As the pup at level 58 I have heeded the advise offered here and added Mystery Snails to my Ancistrus and BN tanks. Man those babies are happy and growing from all the mulm on the bottom. Great post Willie.
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I am pumped. Over the past few days I've had 3 clutches of eggs so far. The first was ready to be turned loose from the egg clutch just now. I gently mushed the clutch in a 10 gallon. OMG there were a ton of them. It was only this much fun because this is the first clutch I have raised from the clutch of eggs I had shipped to me. I know that soon I will be removing clutches from the glass and tossing them.
I put a few MTS in with my plecos. OMG they tripled in size. Willie was saying they love the mulm, I didn't know that it was fertilizer. lol
I just sold some of the ivory ones to my LFS. They are huge like the size of a golf ball from being in the pleco tank with all the mulm. I sold him 5 for $2 each. Hoping they are popular I have 40 more and 7 clutches cooking away.
That's what my LPS gives me for mine. Earlier in the week I took them a dozen of mixed colors. Twee said that the moment people see them they sell. They sell them for $4 each if I'm not mistaken.
I'm surprised they even have enough of a market to bother selling the little ones. My pet store likes them larger. They don't have to be golf balls but they should be large enough to draw people's attention. Personally, I would rather sell an egg clutch than sell peanut size young. With a clutch you can get hundreds of babies for a small investment if you learn how to hatch them.
Every place I've seen around San Antonio has a crappy snail selection. I'm hoping to change that and maybe make a niche market for myself. :) And I agree, those tiny snails are hard to even see. clutches would be preferable.
I was down in the fish room giving all the fish a nice breakfast. I always give the tanks a good look when I feed to make sure that everyone is fine and see who might be spawning. I saw something that I must have missed for days and days. There was something on the back of my only unpainted tank. I couldn't see what it was but thought it might be a snail that had crawled out. I reached around behind the tank which is along a wall. It was a mature egg clutch! The poor little babies were hatching out and dropping onto a piece of dry styrofoam where I couldn't get to it. I removed the rest of the clutch and put it in the 5 gallon snail baby tank. Oh my word...as soon as I put the clutch on top of the water a gazillion babies fell to the bottom! I'm going to be snail poor if I'm not careful.
I only want 5 - 10 large snails at any one time in my tanks, so picking off and discarding mystery snails is another chore on my fish room list.
It's easy peasy to remove the egg clutches. I haven't done that yet because my LPS buys all the medium size ones I grow out and they grow out fast.