How to get rid or snails in your aquarium
November 7th, 2007 | by admin |Seeing hundreds of small Ramshorn snails in your aquarium is probably what you don’t want to experience. They can “infiltrate” into your aquarium in a couple of ways. The most common way is buying aquarium plants from other fishkeepers or from aquatic stores. Another, but not very usual way how to become a “Ramshorn snails keeper” is to move rocks from one aquarium to another one. If such rocks contain at least 1egg, you will be sorry of doing this action later. Sometimes newbies don’t know what evil can these creatures cause, so they just take a few snails from someone who already “raises” them.
Buying a Pufferfish is not the most clever idea because they may nip other fish’ fins. Another “strategy” how to eliminate these snails is to drain the fish tank. This strategy doesn’t work too because eggs may survive months and months without any water! I tried it myself, so there is no need to test it again 
. I thought that it’s the best idea, but it proved to be a failure only. Another solution is buying a YoYo loach or Paradise fish. Even they eat snails a little, you will need approximately 10 specimens in order to eliminate a colony of 100 snails. Moreover, Paradise fish may eat Guppies and YoYo loaches may fight towards each other.
So what to do?
Use the “carrot solution” - the final solution. The carrot must be laid on the bottom and must be visible. Cut off a piece with about 4cm diameter and 1.5cm height (might be more) and put it into the aquarium. The larger the piece is, the better chance of staying at the bottom is. Once you found a good placement and “installed” the trap, wait just a few days. Firstly the snails will ignore the carrot, but later they will love it . And now it is up to you to pick it up from aquarium, take off all snails, flush them in the toilet and return the carrot back to the place where it plays it’s role 
. You will have to change the carrot from time to time, but it is the cheapest solution and it works perfectly. Just count with me: Get rid of 10 snails each day and you’ll get rid of 100 snails in just 10 days and it will be 300 snails in just 30 days!
What if you have more snails? Use more carrots. Here you can see how they like carrot. When I woke up I removed about 10 snails from there. The picture was taken just 2 hours after the previous removal.
2 Responses to “How to get rid or snails in your aquarium”
By Damian on Nov 25, 2007 | Reply
The carrot solution will not account for any eggs laid in your aquarium Clown loaches are not as aggressive as Yoyo but they do tend to grow rather large which should not be an issue as you can trade them in for some other fish or a few more smaller clown loaches. The loaches love to eat the snails and will clean up the tank in no time you should get at least 3 or more as they are social fish and like to school.
By admin on Nov 25, 2007 | Reply
Hi Damian,
You are right, the eggs will not be affected. However, my goal is to lower the amount of snails as soon as possible. My 42 L aquarium is quite small for Clown loaches
, this is why I am using carrot. When I kept YoYo loaches there, they were eliminating snails, but they seemed unhappy because of the space.