Rabbit Snail in My Aquarium
Like 1 Dislike 0 Published on 9 Jan 2019
Rabbit Snail Care, Feeding and Breeding Guide:
https://smartaquariumguide.com/rabbit-snail/
Rabbit Snails Care
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Rabbit snails are relative easy to care for, however there are few things to consider before buying rabbit snails.
The substrate of the tank should be fine. You can use sand, small gravel or any substrate that is light. Rabbit snails like to dig themselves into the substrate time-to-time, so you need to give them the opportunity to hide.
If you keep rabbit snails with fish, please be careful with medication. Rabbit snails are very sensitive to copper. You should avoid medication that contains copper in your tank with rabbit snails.
Here are the water parameters for rabbit snails:
- Water pH Level: 7.5-8.3
- Water Temperature: 77-86 °F (25-30 °C)
- Water hardness (dGH): 6-12
- 0 ppm ammonia, 0 ppm nitrites, max 10 ppm nitrates
Rabbit Snails Feeding
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The rabbit snails will accept any vegetable or algae based fish food such as flakes, algae wafers even frozen bloodworms.
They love fresh food too such as lettuce, beans, spinach, carrots, broccoli, kale, zucchini, peas, cucumber and even leaves.
Whatever you feed them, make sure you offer a varied diet which is rich in calcium.
Rabbit snails will also eat soft algae, but if there is other source of food, they will avoid algae.
If you keep rabbit snails in a planted tank, you should beware, that some-times they might taste few of your plants. Plants with large and softer leaves and stem plants are their main target.
Plants with strong stems and leaves such as java fern, amazon sword, Anubias or floating plants are safe from rabbit snails.
Though, if your sails are well-fed they will avoid live plants.
Rabbit Snail Breeding
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Rabbit snails are slow breeders. They reach sexual maturity at around one year old when they are 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) in length.
Rabbit snails are dioecious, meaning that they have distinct male and female individuals. They are monomorphic, which means that males and females are similar and can’t be distinguished. They are also oviparous, which means that the female carries the fertilized eggs.
Female rabbit snails can carry 1-3 eggs at a time. They will carry the eggs for about 5 weeks. The female will release an egg sac, which contains a fully developed baby snail. The baby snail will break through the egg shell and will start crawling and grazing on biofilm and algae.
When born, babies are around 1/8 - 1/4 inches (3-6 mm) in size.
Females are able to carry sperm for long time. This means, that once they are fertilized by a male, they don’t need to mate again in order to produce baby snails.
While female and male rabbit snails are very similar, in order to have great success in breeding them, you need to start with at least 6 snails. This way you can ensure that you have at least one female and one male.