# HELP! Something is eating my plants



## mkeevil (Oct 22, 2006)

Hope someone can help, I think when I purchased my plants that there were snail (bad plant eaters) on them... or eggs. Now I have a lot of small (tiny) snails on my plants eating away. Is there a quick way to remove them... or do I have to try to pick them off one by one. 

One by One is going to be hard, they are very small.

-Matt


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## kimcadmus (Nov 23, 2008)

botias are great for snail control. Depending on the tank size you may want a dwarf variety like sidthmunki. small puffers also relish snails but then turn to eating plants. I wouldn't advise any sort of snail away chemical killer as you would obviously end up with issues with so much dead matter in the tank.

I have snails and have found when the plants are healthy and growing vigorously they don't really bother them. The snail seem to primarily eat dead and weak plant matter or very delicate broad leafed plants like lotus


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## trenac (Jul 16, 2004)

Take a piece of lettuce, put it in the tank for a couple of hours, then remove it along with the snails. Repeat as needed.

The snails are actually just cleaning the leaves, most likely algae you can't see. Snails will only eat dieing plant matter, not healthy plants. This goes for the common ramshorn & pond snals, which is the usually hitchhikers.


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## tex627 (Nov 2, 2008)

throw in a small puffer.


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## Bettatail (Jan 14, 2009)

normally small ramhorn and common pond snails don't eat plant, but a tank clean enough without any algae, plants will be on their menu.
assassin snails or leeches eat them. (the leeches here are not those 3 inch long, fast swimming type leeches. they are the half inch size slow moving and can only crawl on the plants type. unfortunately I have them in my shrimp tank, I have to put my hand between the plants in the tank to :fish2: them out sometimes . oh, they are too slow to eat shrimp or fish, )
clown loaches, yoyo loaches, and red tail blue loaches eat snails, but they can get big, become territorial or uprooting your plants. 
or, taking 10 minutes everyday after lights out(snails will appear on any open surface foraging), use a dim light to find and manually crash them.


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## vancat (Nov 5, 2004)

I would caution you about puffers. Some are OK but the (small) ones I had were nipping fins off my fish.
Recommend Dwarf loaches, if you can find them.


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## tripleDot (Mar 30, 2009)

Getting a new fish to solve you snail problem will only turn into new problems... that is unless you really have plans on keeping the snail eating fish.

The best way to get rid of your snail infestation is still this...



trenac said:


> Take a piece of lettuce, put it in the tank for a couple of hours, then remove it along with the snails. Repeat as needed.


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