Part 8: Baby Snails!

BABY SNAILS!

            Ok, so now we come to the next section. Before we get into it I would like to explain something you might notice in the upcoming pictures. That is, a VERY DIRTY tank! The reason for this is A, I was new to the tank world and was under the impression (along with some bad advice) that as long as I had a power filter I did not need to regularly clean out my tanks with a vacuum cleaner or otherwise. B, after I researched and finally came to the conclusion that I did need to vacuum out my tank I simply couldn't because of the baby snails. I had already put them in the tank and they were simply to small. So I added live plants to help filter out everything in the gravel with their roots, ghost shrimp, and bio enzymes to help clean up and break down all that organic matter. As soon as the snails were large enough to survive a vacuuming (about 3 weeks), I vacuumed that sucker out and got it all pristine and clean. So please don't judge. How else are you supposed to learn? Now I have learned and other than the three weeks I was terribly sick with the flu I have kept up on cleaning out all my tanks, and I make sure I do proper research.

            All right! Now with that out of the way here we go, right to the good stuff.

The first four babies that hatched!

Here is a close up!

               Here are the first four babies. When they hatch they are about the size of a pinhead. Though many are even smaller. Some are about the size of an eye of a needle. VERY SMALL! Very hard to see too. Put these four in a little plastic container for pictures, then added them to my ten gallon tank. They disappeared completely for about a week. Then I spotted one, took a picture, and spotted more in the pictures. As they hatched I added them to the tank. For the first two weeks they barely moved. So small were they that they had plenty to eat in their teeny tiny section that they explored. As they grew larger they traveled farther.

This little guy stayed on that orange gem for over a week. Finally started traveling around after that.

Very tiny guys were hard to find. I often just snapped pictures of the bottom of the tank then found them when I examined the pictures later.

Here they are at about two weeks old. They have gotten quite a bit larger. 

Getting older and bigger. At a little over a week they grew more than ten times their original size.

               Here are a couple of pictures to show the size difference between baby and mother at two weeks of age.

               Here are some pictures below to help you spot them in case you had some trouble finding them in the above pictures.

              So at this time I had turned my ten gallon tank into a baby guppy tank. I purchased a 55 gallon for all the adult guppies and mystery snails and kept all the babies from both in the little ten gallon. Guppies every once in a while may peck at them, but they simply don't have the ability to damage the snails. In both the adult tank and the baby tank I have never even so much had an antenna or eye stalk damaged, much less ended up with an injured snail.

             I observed the babies closely. I had the water temperature right at 72 degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature the babies grew very rapidly, which means I had to keep a lot of food in the tank. They were ravenous and ate constantly. They grew more than ten times their original size in the first week, and nearly the same in their second week. They slowed down a bit by week three reaching about five times larger than they were in week two. By week three they grew from smaller than a pin head to this:

             Pretty impressive for such a modest beginning. At this time they were plenty large enough for me to vacuum the tank without injuring any of them, and if one or two got buried in the process, most were able to crawl out on their own. I helped the one or two that didn't make any head way by the end of the day. I kept them in the ten gallon for another week or so, then added them to the 55 gallon. I was also able to count them. I ended up with 91, give maybe two or three to that number, baby mystery snails. 

             Now from what I have researched online, it is normal without any human aid for about 10 to 15 percent of the babies to live. With human aid about 30 percent. So nearly 100 babies was just about right. Especially since I messed up quite badly with incubating the egg sacs. I probably would have had at least twice as many if I had done better in that area.

              Some time later I added them to the large tank with their parents.

Here is one of the first 11 I added to the large tank to test and see how they would do.

This is one of the little guys next to his mother's shell. Yeah sadly Escargo died due to a silly rookie mistake on my part. 

Another baby crawling on the shell of his deceased mother.

Baby busily cleaning the tank. See that shell? The mother, Escargo, was a blue snail. Her shell was white with a blue foot. The blue color was her skin showing through her white shell.

            These babies mother, Escargo died, when I accidently added a ph balancer that I thought was a de-clorinator to the water when I did a water change. The bottles were both yellow and I just didn't look closely enough. After I realized my mistake I frantically did another water change in hopes of correcting the situation before any of my other critters were harmed. I succeeded and Escargo was the only casualty of that mess. For the record I don't use any added ph balancers in any of my tanks. I keep steady ph levels with water changes, baking soda, and enzymes alone. The ph balancer was given to me when I bought a used fish tank (fish included).

            Her shell though is a good lesson in snail color. A white shell, even though she appeared and was categorized as a blue snail. Her blue skin is what made her appear blue through the white shell.

             At nearly five weeks of age their growth had slowed dramatically, though they still grew quite a bit in size from week to week. I believe their growth slowed because I put them in the larger tank and it was several degrees cooler in there.

            They continued to grow more and more. 

              They grew quickly, with strong robust shells, and three months later....

In this picture my hand holding four, and my daughters hand in top left holding one. (She is six)
Large beauties aren't they?

           I had extremely large, Jade, or Green, mystery snails. I ended up giving away all but 11 of them to several different families on craigslist. Now to the next section. 

What I learned!

Next Page: Part 9: What I learned.