Part 6:
My Experience with Mystery Snails, then and now.
Just Four
So there I was with four pretty mystery snails. I had already learned a lot. They were small about the size of a nickel when I first bought them. I had researched what they ate, the ideal conditions to keep them in, and after freaking out that their shells were deteriorating before my eyes, I learned how clear sections of shells is part of normal growth. I had researched about colors, which there are many. I had 3 of all available colors. I was able to determine that I had 3 males, two golds and one wild color, and one female, a blue.
So I thought I would expand a little more on the colors of snails. First off you need to determine the color of the foot, or skin, of your snail. There are only two possible colors of the foot. Basically, light, or dark. A white foot or a black or sometimes called blue foot. This is the easiest part to determine as you have seen the dramatic difference between a white foot and a black foot. But still, here are some pictures to illustrate.
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| Black or Blue foot |
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| White foot |
Both light and dark feet have little red dots on the face, siphon or snorkel, and along the top of the foot. Now the second part of determining your snails color is, of course, the shell. The shell combined with the foot color can make a different color snail. The snail color is referred to what color the shell appears do to both the shell color and the foot color. For example, take a white shell. If the snail has a blue foot and a white shell then the snail is a blue snail. Like Escargo. Her shell appears blue, but really it is white and the blue tint is the color of her skin showing through the shell. A white foot with a white shell would give you a white, or, albino, or pearl snail. All the same snail with different names.
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| Here is a snail with a blue foot and a white shell. The foot and shell combination makes a Blue Mystery Snail |
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| Here is a snail with a white foot and a white shell. This makes a White Mystery Snail |
Different shell color and foot color combinations make for different colored shells. Here is another example: A gold shell with two different colored feet. Gold shell with a white foot equals a Gold Mystery Snail. Gold shell with a dark foot equals a Jade or Green Mystery Snail.
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| A white foot with a gold shell makes a Gold Mystery Snail. |
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| The same gold shell with a blue foot makes a Jade or Green Mystery Snail. |
I like to call the dark feet, blue because they show blue through a white shell and a blue foot plus a yellow shell makes green. Some shells, like the rarer burgundy aren't affected by the color of the foot, but remain the same, whether the foot is white or blue. Here are a couple of websites that will help determine the color of your snail.
This website has both descriptions and pictures for most colors to give you a better idea about the color of your snail.
This website doesn't have pictures, but helps with the terminology and abbreviations of different colors. Which is really helpful when you go to a website or forum and they have terms like dsp and csb. It can be really confusing. This website lays it all out. I would keep it bookmarked and ready to refer to when surfing the web and gathering info about mystery snails.
This next link is a really neat color generator that may help in determining what color your babies may be based on the parents.
Don't take it 100 percent true though. Snail genetics is a very unstudied area. About the only thing that has been consistently proven is that if you breed the same two snails together they will reproduce the same colors for every batch. If you take either one of the parent snails and breed them with a different snail then you will get something different. And those two new parents will consistently give you the same colors together. So don't believe everything you hear.
I have heard all different kinds of things. Some people say that unless you keep the colors pure (white to white, or blue to blue, or gold to gold) the colors always turn out a muddy brown. This I have found to be absolutely false and in fact have NEVER come across a muddy brown mystery snail. Some say you have to look for the cross of shell and foot combinations to get certain colored offspring. I have found this to be at least partially true. As I bred a gold snail (white foot and gold shell) to a blue snail (blue foot and white shell) and I got a cross. A blue foot with a yellow shell that was obviously a shell/foot combination cross that came from both parents. But I also got purple babies by breeding a wild color with a jade snail. So it is all in the parents genetics, and what ever happens to be dominant or passive that they may or may not pass on to their offspring. Really all you can do is breed them together and find out for yourself.
So I had learned a lot. I had a happy little tank with four mystery snails, some guppies, some ghost shrimp. Now I just sat and enjoyed watching my snails. Until that is, Escargo decided it was time to expand the family.
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