Snails eat plants
We are looking for advice with a problem and hope you can help us. We got a 60 liter (13.2 US gal.) aquarium as a gift, and the ramshorn sail that came along causes the problems. It eats every plant that we added! What can we do? Is there maybe some food for snails that would distract it from our plants?
Hello,
I am rather certain that these are not ramshorn snails (Planorbarius corneus) in this case, as they only very rarely (in case of severe lack of food) eat healthy plants, and even in such cases they will do so only on soft, young sprouts.
I think it is likely that your plant eating snail is a South American applesnail from the Marisa genus. These snails look very similar to ramshorn snails, but they grow considerably larger and eat even hard plants. These snails are so voracious that even additional feeding with herbal fish food (e.g. sera Spirulina Tabs), lettuce or cucumber slices does not stop them eating the aquarium plants down to their stems.
If you are generally interested in these actually rather interesting and beautiful snails, you can set up a small aquarium for them and feed them herbal food such as the above mentioned sera Spirulina Tabs regularly. 10 - 15 liters (2.2 - 3.3 US gal.) are sufficient for 2 grown specimens, but check the hardness regularly - the snails have high calcium requirements for their shells!
Best regards
sera GmbH
Dr. Bodo Schnell