HELP!! I'm being overrun by snails!!!

[Malyssaasaurus]

I think they hitch hiked in on a plant I recently bought. There are at least a dozen of them, probably more. This is in my 1.5 gallon cherry shrimp tank. So a dozen in a 1.5 gallon is A LOT. What do I do? Also, my shrimp have started to disappear. I had 3. Now I have 1. I found a shrimp head. Do snails eat shrimp?!!?

And yes, I'm freaking out a little bit.

[Trillianne]

Generally speaking, most snails are not known to attack and kill shrimps. They will eat shrimp that have died.

Your options in that small of a tank are to pick them out, or introduce a snail predator that would fit the space, perhaps a single assassin snail.

I am curious what your water parameters are if you are having a snail population explosion and dead shrimp.

[Malyssaasaurus]

My water parameters:

Ammonia is 0.
Nitrate is 0.
Nitrite is 0.
pH is 6.2.

I do weekly water changes and twice weekly testing. Since it is such a small tank I pay extra attention to it to make sure nothing goes wrong.

I thought about getting an assassin snail but I didn't know if that would work out for my tank since it is little.

[Byron]

I see a possible issue for the shrimp. With a pH of 6.2, you may have soft water. Do you know the GH of your tap water (or tank, they will be close unless you are deliberately targeting the GH)? This is where the hard minerals, especially calcium, comes from to keep the exoskeleton of shrimp healthy and growing. Snails need it too, but I have good luck with snails in my soft water.

Also, knowing the snail species will help. If they hitched in I would expect them to be one of the small varieties, like pond snails, bladder snails, ramshorn snails or Malaysian livebearing. Here are some photos to help you ID them. The bladder look much the same as the pond, so for our purposes this will suffice. None of these will eat live shrimp but will of course feed on dead shrimp, dead plant matter, dead fish, fish waste, etc. These snails are your friend, particular the Malaysian. They can all get into places you never could, eating any organic matter to break it down faster for the bacteria to handle. And none of these eat plants that are live/healthy.

Malaysian Livebearing snails.jpgpond snail.jpgramshorn snail.jpg

[sheamurai]

You can always just use a snail trap, if you really do want to get rid of them. They are pretty easy to make up. Generally tho, the snail population will only explode if there's lots for them to eat...
But they shouldn't hurt other inhabitants, there's really nothing wrong with having them in your tank. I kinda freaked discovering some in my tank too, back when, but the initial population has dropped now and I don't mind them at anymore.