Reverse Respiration

[Odd Duck]

There is liquid fenbendazole available in various places and it can be used.  The solution in your link is 25 mg/ml (25 grams / liter).  I haven’t used fenbendazole in tanks yet so let me check the dosage in my favorite formulary.

Looks like I have 1.5 mg/L for a 12 hour bath.  Google says 1/8 teaspoon of powder (22.2% drug) / 10 gallons so likely fairly equivilant.  The powder is more easily available in the US and our liquid is a different concentration so let me math it for a second.

So if we take your sheep/goat/cattle dewormer at 25 mg/ml and aim for 1.5 mg/liter, then you’re going to need 0.6 mls / 10 liters of your 25 mg/ml (25 grams/liter) solution.   So 14.4 ml / 240 liters.  I would recommend either a large water change (50% or more) in 12 hours, and again in 24 hours.  Or remove the fish and leave the fenbendazole in for a week to be certain you’re clearing all the snails.  Then do a full water change.  Run the tank another week and do another full water change (or as close as you can get to that).

Personally, I like snails and use fish that will keep them at least somewhat controlled or I do my best to not be so heavy handed with food (that’s the most challenging part).  If I wanted to clear snails from my own tank, I would pull all plants and RR them.  Remove all substrate and replace with fresh and very careful scrub /scrape all sides and under the rims of the tanks.  Clean the glass top, clean the filter and rinse my foam blocks I use in the HOB’s, and carefully inspect the foam blocks and the air-driven sponge filters for any snails.  Then I would watch very closely for at least 2 weeks for any baby snails appearing out of the filters.  If you blitz your biofiltration with fenbendazole it will take you at least a couple weeks to get the tanks cycled again, so replacing substrate completely is the quickest, best way to make sure you aren’t getting snails back.  If you want to be really certain quicker then replace any media in filters and treat any sponge filters with peroxide.  Then start over on cycling.

@Goldfire Are you sure there aren’t any loach species you like enough to keep?  Most loaches will eat snails, even Kuhli loaches.  They aren’t going to eat the adult snails but they will eat babies and keep the population controlled.  You might be surprised at what you can accomplish with crushing small snails, removing large snails, and getting a small shoal of loaches or even a single loach that will spend their time hunting down the snails.  What kind of fish do you have in the tank currently?

Edited Sunday at 11:16 PM by Odd Duck
Typo

[Goldfire]

@Guppysnail Not a problem, thanks for checking.

@Odd Duck Thank you for typing that up and working it out for me. It looks like I'll have some planning and to have a think about how to tackle this.

Sorry, I should have mentioned my current tank stock, I currently have:

20x Neon Tetra - I think, I can never count all 20 at once...
3x Female Balloon Mollies
2x Gold Dust Mollies
2x Bristlenose Catfish
5x Male Guppies

We're looking at a Male Balloon Molly this week, as well as 3x Male Guppies, and 2x Super Red Bristlenose Catfish. I don't plan on adding anything beyond this as I feel it might be getting a bit overstocked.

I was looking at getting a pair (at least) of Pakistani loaches initially, but the local pet store advised against it as the Neon Tetra's may end up as food for them, and that they grow quite large/territorial. If you're confident that they'll mix with the above comfortably, I'll go down that route instead instead of going scorched earth on the tank.

[Odd Duck]

The loach species you’re talking about may be problematic with the neons and they do get large enough to be an issue for 2 of them.  There are loach species that would be fine with neons - lots of options out there.  I’m a bit surprised you have so much of a snail issue with that many mollies since they are known to sometimes eat small snails.  How long has it been that you’ve been on the lower food level?  Seems like mollies and better food control would have snail numbers reduced by now?

[Goldfire]

I've never actually seen any Mollies attack any snails. I've been on the lower food level for about a month now with the tank being three months old.

The flakes I use are quite large, bigger than some of the fish themselves, so I put the food in a salt/pepper grinder and I do a controlled amount. I used to feed twice a day initially when the tank was new, but I only feed once a day in the morning now.

I twist the grinder so the small fish can actually eat the flakes, once I see that it's all gone, I do another twist of the grinder. Repeat about 8 times, the end result is about a pinch worth of food if I was doing it by hand, just that the flakes are now smaller.

I wouldn't say the snail issue is super large or anything, I check on the tank in the morning and I might have the front glass covered with about 30 snails. Initially, it was into the 100's easily, so feeding less has definitely helped.

That said though, thank you for your help and input, I'll have a think about what I'd like to do long term. Whether that's going with Loaches or looking at the dewormer side of things.

Edited Wednesday at 12:23 AM by Goldfire

[Odd Duck]

On 10/15/2024 at 6:43 PM, Goldfire said:

I twist the grinder so the small fish can actually eat the flakes, once I see that it's all gone, I do another twist of the grinder. Repeat about 8 times, the end result is about a pinch worth of food if I was doing it by hand, just that the flakes are now smaller.

How long does it take your fish to eat each twist of the grinder?  That sounds like a lot of work.  I do a pinch and either serve it “whole” to tanks with bigger fish or grind it fine between my fingers and I’m done.  I am feeding a lot of tanks, though, so it makes a difference.  Have you done those same 8 twists into a dish to get a better idea of how much you’re feeding?  If I put fish flake into one of my pepper grinders, 8 twists would be far more than any of my tanks need of flake food, even by 100 G tanks.  I do feed other foods to those tanks also since I have bottom feeders, but the top and midwater feeders wouldn’t need 8 twists from my grinder.  Yours may not produce as much, (spice / pepper grinders can have vastly different outputs) which is why I suggest putting the 8 twists worth into a dish to see how much it turns out to be.

A good rule of thumb I read many decades ago is to feed as much as it would take to fill 1.5 eyeballs of your fish.  This doesn’t always work since fish can have proportionately large or small eyeballs (we don’t need to discuss how to apply this rule to blind cave fish), but it is a decent starting place for most of the more commonly kept fish.  If you’re not sure if it’s too much you can post a pic of the results with a ruler for scale and we can give suggestions / recommendations if we think you might need to adjust the amount.