I keep snails and shrimp. What I've noticed is that when you have shrimp they outcompete the snails almost to extinction. Which leads me to believe, that shrimp and snails do the same job in a tank...detritus eaters(with some of them eating certain algae as a bonus) Now lets kill all snails and shrimp...What happens to that detritus? Does it magically disappear...no...What will happen is the next organism in line will take over, which happens to be bacteria...Bacteria needs to multiply on a far greater scale to do the same job snails/shrimp do...One can't see the bacteria and thinks...problem solved
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However, one doesn't get to chose which bacteria multiplies out of proportion to replace the snails/shrimp. And often it is multiple type of bacteria, some of them pathogenic....
On the contrary, shrimp and snails are a great addition to breeding tanks/fry tanks because they prevent excessive food developing bad bacteria. I've had great results keeping large population of shrimp and some snails with cory fry.
There is anecdotal evidence also that certain snails eat fungus from fish eggs too. I think there was a thread on planetcatfish about that. Yet, people always think aesthetics.and .not functionality of the entire system..
So I wonder, why doesn't anyone that has a large snail population think about the origin of the problem and the consequences of eradicating an organism completely. Why do you hate snails but treat shrimp like special subjects when essentially they play the same role?...
I personally like all types of snails and I do not dislike how they look. I find them interesting too.. But as I said,...I was only able to keep them in fish only tanks, where the tank does not contain clown loaches...
Shrimp or clown loaches(and some other loaches) will outcompete/eradicate the snails early or later but the issue is the the tank accumulating detritus...providing overfeeding is not the origin of the problem...But if you feed a shrimp containing tank daily properly...you still won't have many snails, if any..You'll just have many more shrimp.....
So my suggestion for a solution is, get shrimp if you hate snails..
Do not kill and in fact add at least one type of larger scavenger in your tanks...otherwise be diligent with cleaning the tank properly and don't overfeed...which applies to any tank in fact unless you want to multiply something out of proportion