Starting over without killing the snail

I am looking into . Two frogs have passed away, the last is in quarantine and will need a clean tank in the event of a miracle.

I've read several methods of nuking a tank, but I don't know what to do with my nerite snail. I fear he could be a carrier for the killer, so I don't want to put him with a future generation of frogs. I don't know if the frog killer is just an amphibian disease, so I'm reluctant to relocate him to my fish tank. And as much as I like him, I don't want to maintain a 10 gallon snail tank.

More generally, how do you rebuild safely after devastating, but not total, loss? Bonus points for preserving live plants.

 

put it in quarantine for a while a pet carrier

Did you ever confirm cyano?

As for nuking a tank reduce the tank to just the tank no substrate at all then bleach tank 19:1 ratio let dry completely then wash it down with a strong salt mixture then with clean water your frog can stay in qt till you id the cause of death for the others.

I would probably discard the substrate and just wash new stuff discard filter media and bleach inside of filter. Plants can do a bleach or salt or potassium permagrante dip they should survive.

then I recommend a fishless cycle.

 

It looked like cyanobacteria, but I didn't notice any odor. Whatever it was hasn't come back since I scraped the glass and scrubbed all the decor in a bucket of tankwater. I can rest easy that it won't survive a nuke.

I'd like to save the MTS while I'm at it. They haven't overbred, and have cleaned places the nerite can't. All could live in quarantine ("the bomb shelter") until the 10G is habitable again. I just worry about what I may reintroduce once the snails move home.

 

Do we know for sure that it was disease and not a minI cycle or spike in ammonia that killed them? I've not heard of any diseases passed between snails and frogs, but that's not saying there's not.

 

well the tricky part will be to separate them from the sand I would say slowly washing the sand through a screen might do it big ones you could rake out of the sand and just start a new colony of them

The issue is the snails you have could be carriers for what ever killed the 2 ADF and what ever it was could still be in them what I would do is rake out as many mts as you could put them in a travel container with the nerite then wash the sand through a screen to get any smaller mts out that you can what you do with the sand after that is up to you perhaps keep it wet in a bucket see if any baby mts come out. Or you can toss it in your yard spreading it in the grass the waste and bacteria and any baby mts the screen passed will fert your yard. Or just leave it in the bucket let it dry out then wash it several times and take the chance

 

I don't think it was a spike. Ammonia 0, nitrate 0, nitrate <= 10ppm, steady pH throughout the entire crisis. The only known bad water was the , but that was after two had died, and the third briefly perked up afterward.

Will definitely replace the sand and filter media. If it's neither alive nor expensive, it's out.

Still to be determined is whether the refurbished tank will hold frogs or a betta. I figure a betta is safer, because the killer would need to target both fish and frogs without first killing the snails. I'm also leaning betta because I don't know where I can buy healthy frogs with confidence.

 

just thought of a decent way to remove the sand use a syphon and actively try to suck the sand out the mts should be heavier and drop back down. I would still have the output going into a screen over a bucket.