How to kill snails in the aquarium: Get Rid of Aquarium Snails.

Pest snails can be a problem when it appears in large numbers in the fish tank. If the conditions for snail growth are met, it can flood your aquarium with many snails and snails' eggs.

Pest snails are annoying to any fish keeper in the hobby. Especially when the number of pest snails explodes in the tank makes your fish tank look terrible. Luckily five proven methods let you kill snails in your aquarium and eliminate the number of pests snails growing in your tank.

5 Methods to eliminate pests snails and kill them:

Control Algae
Add snail eaters
Collect snails from your tank by placing lettuce leaves on the surface
Stop overfeeding your fish
Use chemical treatment

1- Control Algae growth

Algae is the primary food source for snails. Therefore, when you have a high algae growth rate, you provide snails with a rich food source to grow and reproduce.

Try to solve the algae growth problem by reducing the lighting hours to only 6 hours, and it is recommended to use a timer to control your lighting based on a defined schedule of 6 to 7 hours based on the number of plants you have in the tank.

If your fish tank lights are so bright, you should add dimmer or replace your light led to reduce the intensity of the fish tank lights.

Changing more water from your fish tank will help reduce your algae growth rate. Fresh water will remove excess nutrients from your fish tank water and reduce algae growth.

2- Add snail eaters

One of the effective methods to reduce the number of snails in your tank is to add fish that feed on snails. For example, you can add any of the following fish species that eat snails:

Clown Loach
Yoyo Loach
Zebra Loach
Dwarf Gourami
dwarf chain loach
Striped Raphael Catfish
African cichlids from lake Malawi: most lake Malawi African cichlids eat snails
Assassin snails

3- Collect snails from your tank by placing lettuce leaves on the surface

While this method can still work with tanks with a few snails, it will not be effective when your fish tank is loaded with many snails and snail eggs. This method depends on attracting the snails to a leaf of lettuce or cucumber and then manually removing them from your tank. It's not a very effective way, but it can still help collect and reduce the number of snails in your fish tank.

4- Stop overfeeding

As the growth and reproduction of snails are due to the biological load in your fish aquarium, if you want to control the snail population, control how much you are feeding your fish and the amount of uneaten food that remains in your tank.

You can also increase your tank maintenance rate by using a gravel vacuum more often and doing water changes to ensure that you cut the amount of food that goes to the snails in the aquarium.

5- Chemical Treatments

Chemical treatment is the most unrecommended method to get rid of snails. It can introduce more problems to your tank and aquarium plants than benefits. It depends on using copper-based medications to kill snails. The problem with using copper-based medications is that it kills plants and invertebrates. You need to remove plants and invertebrates from your tank before treatments.

How to avoid getting snails in your fish tank?

Your fish tank gets pest snails mainly from one of two sources; new plants or water from your new fish bags.

It is easier to prevent than to cure; before putting any new plants in your fish tank, you must wash them with fresh water many times, and you can dip your new plants in bleach solution for 3 minutes and rewash the plant.

Aquarium salt dip can also be used with new plants. you need to dip the plants in the salt solution for one day. it is weaker than bleach and will not give you good results like the bleach solution dip. A bleach dip is the best way to kill pest snails that may be attached to the new plants.

Are Pest Snails Harmful?

Despite that, they are called pests. Pests snails are not harmful, and they provide benefits to your tank ecosystem. For example, snails benefit aquariums by eating decaying matter like uneaten food, fish waste, and rotten plants.