I had previously written about the new aquarium that we had set up at our house. We’ve had some recent events that have had all of the fish scared out of their little minds.
Sometime shortly after we put the creatures into the tank, our two snails died. Such is the nature of home aquariums - sometimes things just don’t make it. The first one went early, the second one some time later, both to be found just bobbing in the water, shell-down. We were sad. At first.
Soon after we discovered that the second snail had died, we noticed that there were a bunch of small things roving around over the gravel. They looked so much like little bits of gravel that we had not noticed them before. Indeed, they were baby snails. Bazillions of them.
Well, maybe not quite literally bazillions, but there were quite a lot. The kids had made a game of frequently re-counting the total snails in the tank. Abby got quite easily up to 32. 32 might not sound like a large number, but when you think about it, that’s a whole lot of snails. That’s more snails than we have fish. We no longer have a fish aquarium, we have a snail aquarium.
The fish seem to be getting along with the snails ok these days, but they did take the snail birthing a bit poorly when they first arrived. I haven’t seen our orange platys out in the tank since the baby snails showed up. You can see them swimming fretfully back and forth inside the underwater house, occasionally looking out the door to see if any little snail invaders are coming.
There are seriously a lot of snails. I don’t know which I find more disturbing - the quantity of snails, or the fact that there is enough vegetation in the tank to support the lot of them. Yes, they just keep getting bigger.
I’m not sure what to do if they start to get, you know, adult-sized. I can’t have 30-some adult-sized snails infesting my fish tank. What can I do? Sell the extras back to the fish store?
You can’t see it in the thumbnail, but the photo above is replete with snails. Click on the photo to get a bigger version and see if you can find all of the snails. It’s a fun little game.
