I'm ashamed to admit this but I cannot keep nerite snails alive for the life of me like
I can do cherry shrimp mystery snails amano shrimp like you name it but the nerite snails always seem
to drop like flies and I don't know what it is it's like every time I see them upside down and
then their trap doors open and they haven't moved for over 24 hours my stomach just drops so I want
to talk about all the ways that they have died on me in the past and how I finally figured out
how to keep them alive reason number one tank bully so my first ever nerite snail was named
Chewy which is short for Chewbacca because he was roommates to a better fish named Darth Vader now
Darth Vader was actually a really good community fish in a 20 gallon tank but in a three and a half
gallon tank not so much so he would keep the betta fish would keep inspecting my nerite snail maybe
poking around a little bit Chewy did not like that he kept shrinking and hiding in his shell
and eventually he would crawl out of the water onto the filter to hide from him but because of
all of the betta fish's investigation of him he eventually ended up dying of starvation speaking
of climbing out of the water now this has never happened to me before but reason number two while
your nerite snails might be dying is because they are notorious escapers now I know some people they
try to prevent that by dropping the water line down on their aquarium but some species of nerite
snails they're actually live in the intertidal zones meaning they are used to being underwater
when it's high tide and then being out of the water when it's low tide so clearly they're not
afraid of leaving the water my best advice would be to use a tight fitting lid instead cover all
the snail-shaped holes that are big enough for them to escape and then if you need more tips
I've got a whole video over here on my top ways to keep fish and invertebrates from escaping from
your aquarium now this is an obvious one but if you have ammonia or nitrite caused by fish waste
and other rotting Organics in your aquarium that is toxic to all aquatic animals not just near ice
so what happened is I had a newly set up five gallon tank for my betta fish Sonic I added a
bunch of plants I put a cycled Sponge Filter there and then after a little while I put the
first inhabitant in the aquarium and that would be a zebra nerite snail named Eggman because Eggman
is the mortal enemy of Sonic the Hedgehog well about a week later Eggman stopped moving it wasn't
doing so well of course I immediately took some water test strips and measured yep the ammonia
and nitrite had spiked so what happened basically uh if you know for aquarium plants a lot of them
are grown at The Farms out of water or emersed and then when you put them under water then a lot
of times their emos emerced grown leaves melt away so that they can produce new submerse Grown leaves
which are used to being underwater and one of my water Sprites was melting like crazy the melted
leaves were causing the basically Organics the bio load in the tank to go up and because this
is a newly cycled tank it definitely was not mature enough to handle any inhabitants yet so
lesson learned if you have a new recycle tank and then you have to put inhabitants in it for
some reason make sure to remove any of the melted planted leaves that might be going on in your tank
another mistake that can happen in brand new aquariums is there isn't enough algae for them
to eat so nerite snails typically like really soft Brown diatom algae soft green algae they
have been known to also eat the really hard to remove Green Spot algae which is great especially
on rocks and plants where you can't really use a razor blade on them but once they run out of the
good stuff you're gonna need to supplement that food now the problem is when I fed algae Wafers
for example the other fish would attack the food first and then the nerite snails were super slow
and never seem to get enough food from the The Leftovers so instead I would try some foods that
maybe the other fish aren't as interested in so things like zucchini slices canned green beans
um Zoo Med Nano Banquet block is really good because it has spirulina and a lot of calcium
in it which is good because your nerite snail they aren't getting enough minerals and calcium
um in the water as well as in their food they can develop holes and divots in their
shell which isn't good the mystery I had on my hands is that my nerite snails were still dying
even though they were surrounded by algae had great water quality there are no tank bullies
etc etc like I would put them in the tank they would be happily eating algae and then like a
week later they would stop moving and then die and this is not I'm not the only person this has
happened to like you read online and like tons of people are complaining about the same thing
so what's going on well I just set up a brackish aquarium recently as you may know from this video
and I did get three nerite snails three red onion nerite snails for the tank and I've never seen
nerite snails be happier they're like constantly moving around they are cleaning the glass the java
fern the substrate I even found one eating blue green algae which is actually a cyanobacteria
and apparently tastes nasty so I didn't even know animals could eat that stuff and there they were
so here's what I think the problem is uh my tap water naturally has high pH but it's pretty
soft as low GH and KH and so usually I have to supplement with minerals like Seachem Equilibrium
so that even my plants will be healthy much less my fish well equilibrium contains potassium
calcium magnesium iron and manganese versus you know a lot of these nerite snails they can live
in fresh water and brackish water but I think they actually prefer some of these species prefer
brackish water because Marine salts not only contains the minerals that equilibrium has but
it also has obviously sodium chloride but sulfide bromide strontium fluorine Boron like tons of
these Trace elements all of which are apparently essential to nerite snail health so what does
that mean for trying to keep nerite snails in my normal freshwater planted aquariums because salt
kills plants and I need to know how much Marine salt can I safely add to a planted tank without
killing them right well according to Corey from aquarium Co-op at the 29 minute Mark of this live
stream over here he talked about how he used to have extremely soft tap water almost like RODI
water and in his experiments he was able to safely add one teaspoon of marine salt to 20 gallons of
RODI water and that was proven to be beneficial to live aquarium plants because you're basically
remineralizing the water and adding minerals that the plants need at a much diluted rate
so I think personally since I don't have RODI water out the top I would probably try maybe a
fourth of a teaspoon at first with planted tanks and then see if I can strike the balance between
keeping the plants alive and also keeping the nerite snails alive thank you to all my
amazing members for your support if you feel like narrate snails are just not worth the trouble and
you have soft water like me definitely check out mystery snails they're they get about like this
big they're very colorful and entertaining and I have a great video over here on the pros and
cons of keeping mystery snails take time to enjoy your aquariums and I'll see you in the next video