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Could a pea puffer kill and NOT eat enough snails to cause an ammonia spike?


LoachTruther
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I'm thinking about adding a pea-puffer into a planted tank I have right now with no other fish, only a thriving population of ramshorn snails. I know pea puffers will eat the snails and I don't really mind. But I've also heard that once they're full, they'll keep killing the snails, just not eating them. Does anyone know how determined a pea-puffer is to kill every snail? Is there a chance it'll kill enough snails without eating them to cause an ammonia problem in the tank from all the snail bodies?

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Pea Puffers are called Murder Beans for good reason. They are ruthless, and will have a grand time killing every snail they can find. I've heard many stories of people stocking tanks with pest snails for their Pea Puffers, and then having to deal with an ammonia spike from all the snails their puffers killed. 

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I have a pet theory that you can use an external breeder box as a self-feeder for a puffer. My breeder boxes tend to get overrun with snails because I feed the fry frequently. Where the breeder box drains back into the tank there's typically more than a few snails that have crawled out to join the big tank. If you're raising a puffer putting a breeder box (I use the Marina/Fluval ones) on the outside of the tank and feeding the breeder box snails heavily, might just give you an unlimited amount of snails to feed a puffer and they'd auto-feed by wandering out and into his/her jaws. They'd trickle out slowly enough that you shouldn't have a massive dead snail ammonia spike, but they'd trickle out frequently enough to keep the hungriest smaller puffer well fed. I suspect a puffer would quickly learn where the snails drop into the tank and stake it out waiting for his/her next snack. 

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I recently added pea puffers to my 10g and they killed/ate all the snails in my tank within a few hours. I just made sure to remove the snail remnants I could find and test the water frequently and never saw an ammonia spike so I don't think it'll be and issue as long as you stay on top of getting rid of dead snails, testing and doing water changes. 

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Just now, Jennifer V said:

@gardenman what a great idea! I just got a small tank to breed snails for the puffs but I love your idea to keep the snail population going so I don't run out too quickly. My puffs are little monsters! 

Yeah, I kind of stumbled upon the idea as my breeder box with my Super Red Pleco fry was getting filled with hundreds (literally hundreds)  of pond snails. I'm using one now to raise red Ramshorn snails while I don't have any pleco fry in it and they're reproducing at a very good rate in there. If you have a smaller puffer, it's a pretty neat way to auto-feed the puffer. The snails wander out on their own on a regular basis. It wouldn't work on a larger puffer like Murphy, but for the smaller guys/gals it should work out pretty well.

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So interestingly, my pea puffers ignore my neocaridina shrimp adults. They may eat juveniles, but I haven't seen it. The shrimp colony eats the snail remnants, and I just toss in a handful of snails when my other tanks get overrun.

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Now, it could be that my pea puffer Siegfried is sick, god forbid, but I think he's just lazy. He has at least 20 ramshorn snails all around him at any time. I think there's such an abundance from my overstocked and probably overfed livebearer tank that he can be very picky about which snails he hunts. He likes it easy peasy, only really goes for the floating snails, and then only bites off their heads and lets the rest fall to the ground.

The rest of the snails consume their fallen comrades. Isn't nature wonderful?

No saying what kind of temperament your puffer will have, but to be safe I'd recommend starting a colony of malaysian trumpet snails in the tank in addition to other feeder snails. They'll mostly burrow during the day and only come out at night when the puffer's usually sleeping. They'll clean up well. And if you have a lot of plants, that'll also help with trace ammonia if the live snails aren't keeping up with the dead ones.

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