Please help, I’m a complete newb!

[u/NiwaLeaf]

Hi everyone, I’m completely new to keeping an aquarium. I have one mystery snail named Pokey lol my mom found her old shallow murky tank by the side of the road with the garbage and she was inside. (I think she) I told my mom to bring her to me lol so now I have gone and got her a 5 gallon starter kit tank, I have crab cuisine and bug bites. I’ve been reading and watching videos but still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. What you see in the video is the new tank setup, there’s a couple live plants in there, I got some sand and did sand on one side and her old gravel from her old tank on the other. I didn’t rinse the rocks and used some of her old water in this tank. I see people do a rotating diet but I don’t know how often to feed each thing and when? Anything else I should know to help (her?) thrive?

[u/Snoo-28549]

Well since I already have algae growing, they get the extra food 2x in one week. I dont listen to the websites that say only feed what they can eat within 2 minutes. That applies to fish, not snails. Snails are slow eaters or grazers. They eat anytime but seem to be most active at night when it gets dark. This is when they do their heavy munching. I will see snails still eating away after a day but within 2 days or 48 hours, its all gone. As long as it's not clouding up the water and the snails are still on it, it stays in. With one snail, I would try a small amount like half a zucchini slice and see how it goes. They seem to be able to smell it cause my snails start to congregate fairly quickly (for a snail) over to the new food.

[u/NiwaLeaf → u/Snoo-28549]

Great, thank you! :)

[u/DianeMarieArt → u/NiwaLeaf]

Snails are not nocturnal, they have a different sleep cycle altogether. I forgot the actual name of this cycle, but I can tell you it's several days active, several days inactive,, almost like tweakers, lol. During the active cycle they take cat naps . Look it up, it's fascinating.

[u/NiwaLeaf → u/DianeMarieArt]

Oh interesting! Yeah, I noticed yesterday she was super active in the day but before was at night so I didn’t know what to think haha

[u/DianeMarieArt → u/NiwaLeaf]

Ha, yeah after I learned this ( I don't know how I came across this, maybe my husband asked me and I looked it up) , I actually made a daily ledger of times my mystery snails were active.

I had rescued about 30 of my neighbors little babies she had too many of, and they were dying because she's disabled and didn't do much to get them rehomed, but anyway, I noticed, indeed, that these guys have a couple to a few days of mostly sleep, then a flurry of activity for a while. Love these little guys! We named them all Bob and it took on a life of it's own I even made a comic panel using photos of the bobs, called, "Day in the Life of Bob" and put them on my Facebook and even made a YouTube channel for them!

[u/NiwaLeaf → u/DianeMarieArt]

Wow what a story! And what did rescuing 30 snails look like? Did they mate like crazy and overpopulate? I’d like to get another but from what people are telling me I’ll suddenly have 100’s lol

[u/DianeMarieArt → u/NiwaLeaf]

Just discard the egg clutches if you don't want hundreds of babies. They only lay them above the water line just wait a day till their dried a little bit and it comes right off.

Oh boy it was crowded and I had to clean my 20 gallon tank like everyday They poop a lot.

I even set up another 10 gallon in the living room but yeah they don't live that long so when they started dying off after a year and a half I ended up with about that many in the 20 gallon in our room, but also, THEY had babies and that was fun, and when the 'bobs ' we called them, were active all at once, I sat mesmerized and talking any pics and videos of their antics.

Which is funny because they'd all like, travel up the glass one by one , go to the top, drop off Parasnail down to the bottom, and do it all over again from one side to the other.

[u/DianeMarieArt → u/NiwaLeaf]

Oh it's easy to avoid having hundreds of them! Just find the egg clutches on the glass ( they only lay above the water line) and discard after a day when they start to harden. It comes off easily.

And it looked crazy, at times! I mean, she had SO many, I later had to come down to rescue the rest and I gave several to another neighbor who had fish tanks , but not before I took a ten gallons of his hands and set up a snail tank in the living room as well, to house the extra Bobs ( mystery snails).

It was really fun! They only live for like, a year. Thet reproduced like crazy! And I was taking egg clutches off the glass nearly every day for months!

Their kids grew up ( I finally let the eggs gestate so I could experience babies, and ONE sprang up, Baby Bob) and had their own kids, eventually.

The first clutch as I said was only one, then, finally ( I say finally, but I only waited a couple months or so, lol) and the second was about 70 maybe. I rehomed them ina matter of days on Offer Up, although they don't allow live pet sales, no matter you are giving them away.

[u/DianeMarieArt → u/DianeMarieArt]

Actually my downstairs neighbor must've had like 150 it seemed. Her first and ( thank God) only clutch. Seemed like 200 , but it probably wasn't that many but sadly, a lot of the ones look left with her had died,... She didn't know not to use her bottled water, which I guess didn't have minerals at all in it, and the water was eating away at their shells. I remember the OG Bobs having their shells distinctly divided between white white on the inner smaller spiral and then green, healthy shell forming after I adopted them.

She only has 3 guppies, doing ok.