Snails

Love them or hate them, theyre a vital part of the ecosystem of any water system. I personally love a quick, scaleable animal that quickly breeds to take over a niche. Snails are the ideal litmus test for overfeeding. You overfeed, they’re likely to bloom exponentially, telling the feeder “Hey, maybe slow down a bit”.

For medaka I can recommend any pest snail that will quickly eat left over food and keep surface/string algae under control. I personally use all the snails, bladder, ramshorn, pond snails (all except trumpet). There is also anecdotal evidence that smaller snails like ramshorn and bladder eat surface debris from eggs which inhibits fungal intrusion.

There are a few videos on instagram where breeders add adult ramshorns to containers with eggs and after a few moments the eggs look much cleaner. I always take these videos with a grain of salt. There are many reasons to have snails, cleaning eggs would be the last reason. First and foremost they skim feed and bottom feed so they clean up any left over food. Theyre not exactly big enough to be eating eggs, other snails like nerite, mystery and apple snails can eat duckweed as adults, so its not a big leap to make the assumption they could be capable of eating eggs, when of sufficient size.

Snails are a perfect primary waste supplier for tanks that are empty but still need some sort of bioload for bacteria scaling later on. I put them in all tanks where I will be feeding fish or other water life. Thier waste becomes a primary source of food for bacteria and in turn other micro/macro water life.

Snails are also a good litmus test for anoxic water influence. If all the snails are hanging around the surface then they are usually snorkling atmospheric air, which means the water is severly lacking in oxegenation. Something will need to be dont immediately to resolve before more issues arise.

I cannot state the benefiets of snails in your aquarium ecosystems. they can look unsightly and infest in large numbers, but this is more a reflection of your involvement then the snails, they are just moving to advantage because the ecosystem allows it, rather then being an underlying pest.