Mystery Snail Care and Breeding: Your Friendly Neighborhood Algae Eater! 

Here are some videos on water parameters important to keeping snails alive! How to manage pH: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-d9N-JliqsJg.html Water Hardness Fully Explained: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xRYdtvakfv0.html Also how to get rid of them (good info for keeping them alive too): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-2OGKjSH6fRw.html

I have a million snails and there all named Gary lol

The only reason I keep snails is because they're adorable in my opinion. Their little antennas(probably not what they're called) are my favorite.

my beta fish is so sweet and gentle, he loves to watch the snails move, and he follows them around a lot. He’s never picked at them and they both love each other’s company!

So I love the snails cuz they do keep my tank clean I have had them for years but the craziest thing happened to Me and i had to share.... so when I do water changes or tank changes I always check for snails and baby fish throughly and then toss the old water into my cactus garden. I have cacti from all over! I even had one shipped from japan! One of my favorite cacti wasn’t thriving anymore, it seemed to not ever be able to retain much water. This summer the temps reached over 100 a few times and I assumed it was just too hot and burnt out. So I decided to flake off all the dead parts and bring it indoors. You guys will never believe what I found!!! On the base of my cactus plant was a huge mystery snail (about 3 inches!) attached super tightly into the base it had been there so long that it had formed a perfect snail shaped cave right into the cactus! I took pictures it looks so crazy! An aquarium animal inside a cactus?! Life is amazing isn’t it always finds a way to survive. Don’t know why this gave me such joy

Nice video on the Mystery Snail. Maybe people will give snails more respect now. And for those who are interested... How to keep Malaysian Trumpet Snails: Add live plants to your aquarium that are guaranteed to not have snails. Three months later, you have 30 of them. Three years later, you have 300. Three hundred years later, (and seven nuclear wars, 3 alien invasions and a direct meteor hit) your great great great great great great granddaughter will have 299 Malaysian Trumpet Snails.

While feeding my guppies earlier I noticed my snails at the surface making a funnel with their bodies, catching the flakes and eating them. It was so cute, like watching a rabbit eat lettuce. I didn't realize 🐌 had such a distinguishable head. That shell hides a lot of cuteness.

Sir, if you haven't done so already, could you do a quick video on the different types of freshwater snails ... at least the popular aquarium ones.

Aghhh!!! My mystery snails just gave birth!! ITS SO TINY!!!!

When my brother moved in with me he took a liking to my aquarium. I told him he could get a Mystery Snail bc it wouldn't be a problem for my other fish haha. A month or two later and now "Swirly" is the biggest animal in my tank haha

I love, love, LOVE mystery snails! I started with one and it was so cool to watch that I got another! I am now an accidental snail rancher with hundreds of snails! They are funny, fantastic, magical creatures! For those of you with soft water, I have really soft water and I've found that it helps to add crushed coral and cuttlebones to the tank. Snails actually need to have calcium in the water column AND a calcium source to eat. I've found that cuttlebones are a great way to provide the dietary calcium. If you had told me a year ago that I would become a huge mystery snail geek, I would not have believed it! Definitely consider adding these magical creatures to your tank!

I have 4 female betas in a 20 gallon heavily planted. I added 6 ramshorns and 4 adult mystery snails. After 3 months they started dying, and many had thin shells. Feed them and add mineral balls. Now I have at least 100 super tiny ramshorns and the mystery snails laid eggs. In the past 6 months, I've never scraped any algae NONE to be seen. Feed 2 times a week, pleco pellets. And the tanks alive with color. ❤

3 mystery snails... 4 mystery snails have appeared out of no where in my guppy fry tank. Something tells me they are in love with the tank. They are growing fast!!!

my mystery snail zooms all over the tank and eats anything...even driftwood. i tried giving him boiled kale but he ignored it. he'll eat sinking pellets and detritus on the substrate. mystery snails are a lot of fun to watch--they definitely have personality!

Also with food as well you can feed them more then just that. I feed mine UNSALTED green beans, blanched Zucchini, snello, blanched Carrots, and cucumbers.

Snails are a must in shrimp aquariums! Shrimp eat their poop & it has beneficial bacteria for their gut! LOVE MYSTERY SNAILS!❤❤❤❤❤😁😁😁

I had a few mystery snails hitch a ride in on some freshwater plants I bought. Sometimes I see my cherry shrimp following them around and cleaning their shells, it's very cute.

I’ve been researching cause I want snails, just snails :) everyone treats them as such a second thought but I love them 💚💚💚

Ironically my mystery snail named Bean ONLY eats carnivore pellets and blood worms. He wont dare touch the algae.

I never thought I would love aquatic snails the way I do, but my mystery babies are all so precious to me. I cried when I saw our first little wee bebe. I love them; so fascinating!!

My snails be lookin like a snaccc

I'm binge watching, and so far I want ALL the fish you have talked about and now I need to breed mystery snails lol. love the channel!

I'm planning to breed mystery snail. Today I already bought a 40 gallons tank. I'm continuing doing research.

I got an ivory looking snail in my cichlid tank and he gets along very well. Had him almost 2 months and hes fine

3 Mystery snails cleaned the white mold/algae off of a very large piece of mopani wood for me right before my eyes. It was awesome.

I got a mystery snail for fun and he is currently kept in a tub with 70 baby guppies. I don't pay much attentjkn to water parameters. The eater goes below 18 degrees Celsius and he is constantly active. He helps clean it which is really helpful. He is also grown bigger.

Also if you have a fungus growing on your driftwood - they LOVE eating this and make quick work of removing this naturally.

I've had golden mystery snails for about 3 months since getting them I've put down a foam mat near my tank so they don't shatter there shells on my hard wood floor when they decide to crawl out the tank past the lid

We just got four for our ten gallon betta tank and I know nothing about tanks but I think they’re doing awesome! We love them And our betta likes them too. He kind of inspected them but he’s so peaceful he just leaves them alone.

I recently read Walstad's book, and I learned that plants produce allelochemicals that deter snails. However, when the plant begins to die/rot, that part of the plant stops making allelochemicals, and that is how the snail knows that they are allowed to eat that.

Thank you so much, I just bought a black mystery snail and he is GORGEOUS! This video was extremely helpful 💖💖

I love snails, I have mystery and pest snails which has entered the tank through plant purchases, but i keep them all. The clusters are soothing to watch.

I love mystery snails. They're almost as much fun to watch as shrimp, they're so darned easy to take care of, and they come in such beautiful colors. Bonus - if you don't want them to make a bunch of snail babies and demanding child support, it's easy to avoid. I just got back into the aquarium hobby. My betta boy should be here in 48 hours and I've got two magenta baby snails to work on the algae. They're in quarantine right now, then I'll keep them in a breeder box till they're a little bigger, but the betta breeder said my boy was raised with mystery snails and hasn't bothered them, so I think it'll go just fine once they're too big to look like lunch. Everyone should be fine in a scratched-up old 5g for now, but next month they're getting upgraded to a 10g to accommodate adult snail bioloads. Honestly, aquatic invertebrates are some of the most mesmerizing creatures in the world. I'm excited to watch these babies grow!

I have 2 snails in with my betta. I’ve had African dwarf frogs in the tank with him, too, and he didn’t attack them, so I’m guessing it should be fine. He’s been checking them out and swimming at the bottom more to look at them, but I haven’t seen any aggressive behavior!

That beard isn't fooling me. I know it's you Bill Burr.

I enjoy watching your channel as fellow fish/plant keeper/grower. Most fishkeepers/planted tank people that have had tanks for several years and waged the war on algae appreciate videos like this one. Snails are great friends/workers and I especially like the mystery snails.

to my surprise i woke up to baby snails in my tank this morning thanks for this video - very informative

I LOVE MY MYSTERY SNAIL her name is mayonnaise and she is very fast ❤️❤️❤️❤️

I've fallen into breeding mystery snails for my local fish store. When I first started, I wasn't doing anything special, apparently the water I use is just naturally pretty good for them (of 663 snails that grew up enough to be deliverable, 662 had perfectly good shells and all seemed healthy and vigorous; I found maybe a dozen or so empty shells, so a really low observable death rate, though I suppose just-out-of-the-egg snails that didn't make it could have had their shells lost in the substrate without me ever finding them). But as I got more serious about it, I have taken water conditions a lot more seriously, so lots of pH increasing agents and powdered calcium carbonate, and daily testing of NH3, NO2, and NO3. My main tank (40 gallons) varies from 78F at the top of the tank to 76F at the bottom, so they can self-regulate as they want. They definitely do not eat living plants. What I find interesting is that sometimes a java fern leaf will detach from the rest of the plant, but sometimes the leaf doesn't die from the separation, even it may sprout new leaves from it, and the snails won't eat those detached-but-still-living leaves. That leaf has to be dead, dead, dead before they will touch it. If snails are eating living plants, that's probably because there's nothing else left for them to eat. In which case, add some food to the tank for them! I like to feed mine lots of different things, but Hikari algae wafers and crab cuisine make up at least half of their diet. Canned green beans (no salt added) are a fast and easy choice as well. And since I have a betta fish, any left over blood worms or brine shrimp or other frozen foods that my betta does not eat all goes into the snail tank for a tasty protein treat for them. Good for operculum growth. My big tank didn't come with a lid, but I bought a thick sheet of plexiglass that covers most of the top. I've never had a problem with a mystery snail crawling out of the tank. Although lately one of them has been crawling up the side of the filter to lay eggsacks, and those eggsacks are such that hatchlings would not drop into the water, but onto the floor, so I have to take those eggsacks off the filter and incubate them. Otherwise I just leave them on the wall of the tank. I have had two eggsacks laid on the plexiglass though, but that's fine, they develop and hatch out normally. I have found the first couple of eggsacks a snail lays are minimally productive, but after 4 or 5 eggsacks they start to get very successful and productive. So if the first few aren't yielding anything, don't be discouraged, just know it sometimes just takes multiple tries, but they should get there. I recently had an adult snail die, almost certainly old age. For 5 or 6 days it was floating upside down at the surface. After the first day I moved it to a separate 5 gallon tank by itself. It didn't have any strong smell like I was led to expect from a dead snail, so I just left it and made sure to wet any part of the shell that looked like it might be getting dry. But one morning I came to check on it and it was no longer on the surface, it had fallen to the bottom. And when I went to check on it, the body slid right out of the shell and the smell was indeed most foul. When a snail is dead, that smell is unmistakably strong and awful, you will know it. A very slight smell might suggest death is coming, but if isn't knocking your socks off, it's not dead yet. I have another snail right now that is currently just sitting half out of the water, and has been for 4 days now. I'm rather worried about that. I keep pouring water on it so it doesn't dry out. Most of the time it's angled almost 45 degrees, as if to rest its head on the heater it is next to, but every once in a while I catch it completely vertical. Most of the time when I pour some water on it I don't get any reaction from it, even where a snail next to it might react even though the water isn't on them. Today I finally got a reaction from it one time while wetting it down. So it's definitely still alive. Still, 4 days of not moving, other than from 45 to 90 to 45 again, that also means 4 days of not eating, so I'm very worried about it. Also, it's an ivory snail, yet its shell has taken on a reddish cast that my other ivories do not have. Snails have blue blood, so it's naught to do with its blood. I have no idea what's going on with that, and it is proving difficult to find information about it. But it is a lot of fun to watch mystery snails. They are a lot faster than I expected, and they can do some amazing stunts, presumably through the use of much air in its shell. I've seen a snail walk off the end of a horizontal leaf and look like it was still walking as if still on the leaf, much like in cartoons where they run off a cliff and keep running (until they look down...). It's bizarre some of the things they can do, but fun :D

for my snails shells I crush up egg shells and sprinkle this into the tank every couple of months.

They sometimes will leave that's funny how you said that 😂 mine try to escape all the time but I have a lid that I custom built for my corner tank couldn't find a reasonable hexagon lid so I made one great video great information love your channel 👍👍

My golden mystery snail is currently 1 1/2”, named him Jackie after Captain Jack Sparrow 😆 I’ve only had him for a few months but he grew crazy fast!

I own three: a female ivory named Whisper because she likes to just sleep, an unidentified black named Shade because they're IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND, and a female golden named Dorado after the Spanish word for gold. I have no lid, but there is a lip at the top, and I have floating plants. I have a bundle of bamboo skewers that stick out of the top of the water for their eggs, especially since Whisper is now mature and going to produce her first clutch soon, and I feed them boiled veggies. Mostly spinach and the occasional sweet potato cube. I also have some vitamin rich algae pellets with plenty of calcium for some quick nibbles. I'm hoping that Shade is male, but I won't know until they're a little older. They've remained smaller than Dorado and Whisper both, though Dorado was really small when I got her anyways and Whisper's shell is now almost 2 inches wide. Honestly, I won't know for a while. If they ARE male, I'll wind up selling off a ton of baby snails as fast as humanly possible. Already setting up a second tank to hold them, and I have somewhere humid to hold the egg clutches after I remove them from the sticks. Wish me luck, lol

We have 1 big snail and 1 small snail. The big 1 will climb up the glass and wood and just release himself and fly down to another location. It’s entertaining to watch! The little 1 doesn’t do much. He’s boring haha

Jason I really like mystery snails. By "Like," I mean one per tank. They were also brought out of the wild to breed for Escargot, except they were not wonderful to eat. When it comes to other fish, the only time my mystery snail bothered the fish was when they die. A mystery snail can suck back a Khuli loach after it is deceased, pretty quickly. The problem with that is you'll never know why the fish died. I like all snails, but one Mystery Snail per 20 gallon tank is enough! Thanks Jason, your topics are on point!!

Love my Mystery Snails, although my hard water is off the API test chart.

I had a pond snail problem in a tank which was just setup. I put a plant in there which must have brought the snails in. I wasn’t feeding anything because I was cycling the tank. It was a nightmare. The only ones I keep now are assassin snails and nerite snails I. The other tanks. I did order a few mystery snails for my betta tanks.

Still my favorite of all time aquatic creatures. They just bring me an unexplainable peace…

I have three mystery snails in a 20 gallon aquarium with a male siamese fighting fish betta, and they get along fine. The betta is curious, but does no harm to the snails.

I think a lot is similar to zebra apple snails, expect they lay their eggs under water. They bread like crazy in the old tank, in the new tank not so much :( Thanks for the guide 😋👍

I love mine. He's ivory and honestly sooooooooooo cute and cool.

Really enjoy having snails in my tank, busy little creatures to watch. Very excited to have found this afternoon some snail eggs in my HOB filter. The snail snuck in via the outlet, and laid the eggs on the underside of the lid.

Snails are awesome!!!

Another great video mate and perfect timing really 2 days ago i recieved 5 mystery snails looking forward to seeing you tomorrow and just gcca swap in general lol

I didn't need a 2nd snail. I got just one and it made eggs and those eggs hatched into 100s of snails.

I now have about 200 mystery snail's I love them I hate that people think they can, Live on alge alone !

I can absolutely agree with the filter intake part, happened a week ago to my ramshorns

We love our Mystery snails. :)

How often do you recommend feeding a mystery snail? Thanks!

I bought ONE snail and it has transformed into like 100 one day I looked in there and there was a few then one day they were literally everywhere and now I gotta find them homes !

Mystery snails are the secret of the universe. They whisper secrets in the slime to us, The Watchers… all hail the snail!

I love these guys. They are favorite. I breed them. I got a red one. Yes I did say red. It's on my Instagram. Melléwedin.

These are 100% mystery snails. Most of the ones that me showed are Apple snails.

I feed them cucumbers every week lol and they eat it up

I have kept adult Mystery snails in my mixed Tanganyika tank with no problems for about a year now. Cyps, Gobys, Comprecciseps, juvie Frontosas and even the adult Lelupii all leave them alone. It was a bit iffy when everyone was getting to know each other but now it is a very cool setup. I think having a large tank has helped. They are fun to watch and do a great job cleaning up. Great vid.

i am getting a snail called robert pattinson

Love this channel as they show to new hobbyists not to panic about some of the things new hobbyists experience

I was planning to get an aquatic snail for my aquarium. But maybe not a mystery snail. I have a 10 gallon simly planted aquarium (looking for more plants to add) but you said not aggressive fish. I have a betta named Vobo he's a very docile betta I have some neons in there but he never chases them and when I feed them he eats contently along beside them. They even group around him. He's a good boy, the reason why I want a snail is because my algy is building up and some of my plants need some clean up. But just to be sure I'll take him out add in some more plants and the snail before adding him in. Tho I don't really think he'll be all that interested in the snail.

We have Bolivian Rams and Thick lip Sunset Gorami as well as an assortment of Guppies and they all play very well together. We had a Golden Ram however, and he was a stressor in the tank.

I have mystery snails in pH 6.2 . Every second week with water change I use my soda stream with water and fizz then add 2 teaspoons of calcium carbonate. Cheap as chips. When I add it to my 6x2x2 tank it looks so cool like a horror movie with fog creeping through my tank. This only last for an HR or so with co2 injection in my tank. Snails are absolutely fine with great shells. So it's possible with low pH and a little care

My snails are so adorable I wish I could hug them

Your ram cichlids and Bolivian rams plus apistogrammas do really quite well because they are not overly aggressive I've even heard of people keeping kribensis with them

I never take the shells of dead snails out of my tank except for five nerite snail shells that I’m gonna use for decoration in another set up

Love the chiclids tank. Water is crystal clear

They are also quite beautiful additions to any tank

My kid wants a snail for a pet. Just a snail. But we probably have to get an aquatic one since they’re the ones you can buy.

I just got my first mystery snail eggs ❤ can't wait to see some babies

I just bought a snail that did not move for a week. It did not smell so I gave it time. Now it is all over the aquarium. I also think I have a breeding pair. I've seem them mate 3 times now!

Those baby 😍 snails are adorable.

Hey great video lots of info I enjoyed it. Thanks from eastern Canada

I love when new plants have snails hiding in them..... and so do my yoyo loaches.

In my high school we had a marine biology class that we could take. Part of the class that we had to form a group of three and had to set up and aquarium and choose and care for fish. I got the fish, 2 creamcicle molies and a golden mystery snail. The snail helped keep the aquarium clean very well, but I would cut a decent size of cucumber, tied it to a rock and drop it in. The snail would have eaten the whole thing in one night. But she was larger than other snails that I had seen at 2 1/2 to 3 inches.

One blue shell became 28 large ones in a 240 gallon. I had to pair that down to five. They will eat plants like cardamine..very soft leafed plants..and they might eat roots of Bolbitis and Java fern. The vast majority of plants they pretty much ignore. Now,starve them and everything might change..but toss in food that can land on the gravels, or blanched veggies, and they are fun to have.

I bought a single black mystery snail because I don't want them to breed and take over! Its great when it comes to eating algae and almost never stops moving 😁

I have ivory mystery snails and my shrimp and algae eating fish cling onto them and clean their shells for them. Really cool i think!

I love mystery snails have two clutches in my aquarium

just found a clutch of eggs from the gold mystery last night

When I was 6 I had one mistery snail and he constantly escaped xD everytime he hid somewhere for a week, I would drop him back in the tank and he'd be fine.

For calcium issues. Add crushed coral. only really necessary for tanks which are breeding snails maybe sometimes shrimp.

Mine is peach 🍑 and his body is peach with gold sparkly flakes all over. I put him with my small 1 - 2 in cichlids and it just kept in its shel and wouldn’t move so after a couple hours I put him back with my betta. I’m so glad I decided to search videos on RU-vid about why and found this

They go one of best if not best with betta too

Not a snail type of person but the info was awesome! Thank you Jason for sharing!!!!

One,maybe two caveats. Mystery snails will eat the roots of Epiphytic plants. Anubias,Java,Bolbitis. Its sneaky..but after awhile you might see one that is all rhizome as it floats by your face-lol..the snails ate the anchor roots. They also will nibble on moss stems. They might rasp Sword plant leaves. Its either them or Ancistrus..not sure. I took them out and put them in the pond for summer.

Excellent tutorial on the Mystery Snails. Your advice is always spot on. I enjoyed watching. These Snails seem to multiply like crazy at certain times. I will be cycling a tank soon. As soon as I’m close to the end of cycling the tank I will be getting Snails and Otocinclus Fish as my first livestock to my tank. Algae blooms sometimes happen to a new tank. I also want to get some other kinds of Snails too. Can you do a video on the other kinds of Snails? Thank you for sharing this video with us. Your videos are always a joy to watch in midst of some of the garbage on RU-vid!

Any video/article about any type of snail: Make sure ammonia and nitrites are zero, they're very sensitive. My ramshorn snails that got in with plants during fishless cycling: We drink ammonia for breakfast, it puts us in that breeding mood.

Just today I saw that my mystery snails laid eggs, thankfully I saw this video before I saw the eggs because I would've thrown them away. My only problem is if I can keep them with full-grown platys, a clown pleco, other snails, neon tetras, and panda cory cats.

I like mystery snails because there antenna looks cool

They eat soft healthy plants if there isn't enough food in the tank for them. I watched mine eat some healthy water sprite because they ran out of food.

I have 4 mystery snails, 3 bladder snails and lots of malaysian trumpet snails in a 10 gallon tank.

Great vid once again, answered all my questions, ty!