Snail Tank -- What am I Doing Wrong?

[Jennifer V]

@Guppysnail I took everyone's suggestions with the exception of distilled water. I started feeding my snails shrimp food regularly and they eat it up immediately. I also added wonder shell and everyone seems happy and reproducing -- yay! My question is, now I have a HUGE ammonia problem. It went from 0 to 4 ppm in one week. That seems crazy to me. Am I overfeeding? They get a pinch every other day. Ammonia from the tap is .5 ppm. Also, will Ammonia that high break the nitrogen cycle? Readings are at 0 nitrite and 10 nitrates, which leads me to believe the cycle is broken somehow because I would think the nitrates would be higher with that much ammonia. 

[gardenman]

Smaller tanks are more prone to wild swings in chemistry. It's often hard to know if a snail is dead or alive, so a dead snail or two could be causing your ammonia spikes. It's also possible you're getting bad test results. If you're using the API liquid test make sure you've got the timing down. You're supposed to wait five minutes for the final result. If you wait longer than five minutes you'll get a higher reading than what it truly is as the color continues to evolve over time. You want to read it right at the five minute mark. If you're reading it too soon, or too late, you're not getting an accurate result. It's pretty easy to start the test, wander off and get distracted then come back fifteen minutes later and see a huge ammonia spike and panic. Uh, no. If you'd read it at the five minute mark it might have been fine.

Water testing is one of those things where you can have five people test the same water and get five somewhat, to very different results with the liquid test kits. Some shake the bottles and tubes more. Some lose count of the number of drops and guesstimate. Some give it too little time to develop, some give it too much time. Different people even interpret the color charts differently. What's clearly 0.5 on the chart to one person may be 0.1 to another. Test strips are a little better but even those are open to interpretation.

[HH Morant]

That is good advice about doing the API tests correctly.

Water changes are the best way to deal with ammonia that high (4 ppm if your testing is right). I would do 50-75% water changes to keep the ammonia below 2 ppm until the filter starts working properly. 

There are 2 different kinds of beneficial bacteria. One kind converts ammonia to nitrites. The second kind converts nitrites to nitrates. For some reason, it seams that you don't have enough of the first kind.

How much of the ammonia is free ammonia (the toxic kind) depends on your ph. The higher the ph, the bigger percentage of the ammonia is free ammonia. You can find charts on the internet to determine how much free ammonia there is at your ph. The charts will also tell you what level of fee ammonia is toxic to your fish so you can make judgments about what measures are necessary to protect them.

[Jennifer V]

@gardenman I never thought about that. Silly me. I'm using the API test kit but was thinking of getting the co-op strips instead. Would those be a bit better? 

[Ragnarok12]

The dead snail suggestion is a really good one, I would definitely look and see if you have any snails that are deceased. They are ammonium bombs. Also, you can probably smell ammonium if it is truly at 4 ppm, that's super high. How does your water smell? I had a single nerite snail die in my 12 gallon and I could smell a difference in the water. Are you still seeing die off, or has your snail population stabilized? I would be more inclined to believe that the ammonium readings are off if everything in your tank is doing fine. I would expect ammonium of 4 ppm to start murdering everything pretty quickly, so if nothing is dying anymore, then I would say watch your tank with great suspicion.

[Jennifer V]

@HH Morant that is also fabulous advice! I haven't tested the pH in awhile so that may be another reason I'm battling ammonia. I've also started adding Fritz Zyme 7 to the tank when I do water changes in and effort to help the problem -- my thinking being that just as you said, I don't have enough of the ammonia-eating bacteria. Do you think that helps or am I just wasting product? 

[gardenman]

On 8/4/2021 at 9:37 AM, Jennifer V said:

@gardenman I never thought about that. Silly me. I'm using the API test kit but was thinking of getting the co-op strips instead. Would those be a bit better? 

They eliminate some of the variables, but you still have to follow the directions which mean waiting 30 seconds to read the results. Once again if you wander away for a bit and come back, the reading could be wrong. Or if you dip and read immediatley the results will be wrong. All of the tests will give you an general idea of your situation when the directions are followed. A lot of people don't follow the directions though. Some barely dip a test stirp in while others will leave a strip in the water for much longer. Some dip and read immediately without giving the test time to develop. Is one type of test "better" than another? Not really. Just follow the direcitons carefully and you should get decent results from any of them.

[NanoNano]

One other thing to consider is adding a few snails obtained from a completely different source to try to get some genetic diversity in your population.

I've had some inexplicable snail population decimation/extinctions in a couple of my tanks (with the same parameters and maintenance routines as other tanks I had running) where I wonder if (tin foil hat on) an undesirable genetic mutation became dominant as it appeared that the young generations of snails all started to die young while the older mature stock continued to thrive until they aged out and died.

[Jennifer V]

On 8/4/2021 at 10:49 AM, NanoNano said:

One other thing to consider is adding a few snails obtained from a completely different source to try to get some genetic diversity in your population.

 

Oh wow! Ok I'll look into adding from other places. Where do you get yours? 

[NanoNano]

I've bought from ebay sellers and both specifically chosen one's from different geographic areas and messaged them to explain what I was trying to do (just incase they we're getting their stock from a common breeder).  So far, every seller I've messaged has been supportive (given details of where their stock came from,  how long they'd been breeding the same stock, etc.) and accommodating.  Lots of good people in the hobby out there.

Edited August 4, 2021 by NanoNano

[HH Morant]

On 8/4/2021 at 8:43 AM, Jennifer V said:

@HH Morant that is also fabulous advice! I haven't tested the pH in awhile so that may be another reason I'm battling ammonia. I've also started adding Fritz Zyme 7 to the tank when I do water changes in and effort to help the problem -- my thinking being that just as you said, I don't have enough of the ammonia-eating bacteria. Do you think that helps or am I just wasting product? 

The ph does not cause an ammonia problem, but if you have a high ph it makes an ammonia problem worse because a bigger percentage of ammonia is free ammonia.

I have my doubts about Fritz Zyme 7, which I have voiced on this forum before, but mine is the minority opinion. In your situation, it probably won't hurt. When I used it I got a bacteria bloom in the water column - not beneficial bacteria, which grows on surfaces - and I associated the bacteria bloom with the Fritz Zyme 7. 

[Streetwise]

I am catching up on many threads, so please excuse me if I missed any thread details. What are you doing to grow algae with lights or sunlight?

[Jennifer V]

On 8/4/2021 at 6:33 PM, Streetwise said:

I am catching up on many threads, so please excuse me if I missed any thread details. What are you doing to grow algae with lights or sunlight?

Just lights. The room doesn't get much light otherwise. The tank has a lot of pretty green algae that no one in the tank seems to care about. It did have some staghorn but the wonder shell killed all of that and the snails ate the remains. Now the tank looks pristine and has rapidly turned into a jungle because all of the plants are extremely happy. Should I try cultivating some algae in another way? 

[Streetwise]

Do you have well water, treated well water, municipal water with chlorine, or municipal water with chloramine?

[Jennifer V]

On 8/4/2021 at 7:13 PM, Streetwise said:

Do you have well water, treated well water, municipal water with chlorine, or municipal water with chloramine?

Municipal water with chloramine. 

[Guppysnail]

On 8/5/2021 at 12:00 AM, Jennifer V said:

Municipal water with chloramine. 

I contact my borough water for water quality reports.  I dose conditioner (prime) based on the chlorine and chloramine levels since it’s safe up to 5x strength. It works for me. My understanding is it only treats about 1ppm at regular dose. I could be incorrect on this I’m not a scientist but it works for me.