#snail guide

I wanted to make a quick note on handling snails, and some basic safety tips. Lesgoo

How do I pick up a snail?

If your snail is sliming or resting on a surface like concrete, glass, plastic etc they can sort of "suction" onto it. If they are suctioned, Do Not try to tug on their shells to pick them up. This can weaken or damage their mantle, the muscle that keeps them attached to their shell, and can lead to you literally pulling their organs out of their shells.

A method I use often is to spray water on the surrounding glass or plastic, then slide them over to and off an edge onto my hand. You can also use something like a plastic spoon (smooth please, no rough edges!) or a paintbrush (well washed, damp, and never used for paint or anything else beforehand) to sort of slide beneath them and break the suction. You can even use something like a credit card.

Of course, you can also just allow them to crawl directly onto your hand by putting it in front of them lol which leads me to:

How can I hold a snail safely?

Always wash your hands first!! Snails are like frogs, in that they absorb things through their skin. Lotions, soaps, dirt, chemicals, skin oils etc etc are all to be avoided. Wash your hands, then rinse off the soap really, really well.

Don't dry those hands! Snails prefer a nice damp surface to hang out on, because the warmth of your hand is pleasant but can cause the moisture in their bodies to evaporate faster. This is especially crucial in very small snail species or babies. Keep a spray bottle nearby and mist your hand occasionally.

Your snail may bubble up a little when you first pick them up, and even make a squeaking or hissing noise. This is normal and okay, they're just not used to being held. Give them time and they'll realise you're not a predator. If they do continue bubbling without stopping, you may have something they don't like still on your hands. Give them another wash and start again.

How do I keep myself safe when holding a snail?

Snails don't bite, so they can't injure you that way, (ETA because some people have mentioned it; Snails cannot bite, but they can rasp. It's the equivalent of being licked by a tiny tiny cat, that's the structure of their mouthparts! It should never break the skin) but hygiene is really important. Snails are gross little guys who live in dirt and eat mold and such. Do not ever place your snails on your face, or share food with them or anything of the sort, and make sure you wash your hands really really well after handling your snails.

Snails can have little parasites which are generally asymptomatic for them, but can be really dangerous for mammals. Keep utensils and such that you use for snails and their food separate from your human food utensils, and also from utensils and tools used for other pets.

Part one here

Alright. Let's get into the most exciting part. Decor and resident cleaners!

Decor

I've made a couple posts on safe vs. unsafe decor but as a quick recap;

Yes! -

Plastic plant pots, fake or real plants, leaf litter, sticks and twigs, moss

No! -

Stone, ceramic or terracotta pots, crystals, rocks, ceramic, glass or stone dishes/decor (many fishtank decorations are made of stone and ceramic), basically anything hard or pointy.

Decorating a vivarium is great fun. Snails seem to enjoy, as much as a snail can enjoy, climbing and exploring sticks, bark and plastic hides. It also creates visual appeal. I have some pictures of a friend's snail tanks here

basically just have fun with this, and just assess with each decoration if a snail would hurt themselves falling onto it. Nothing pointy, nothing hard.

Clean up crew (CUC), also known as janitorial or custodial creatures.

The most helpful, angelic little creatures. These guys will eat and break down snail poop, old food, mould and other mess in your tank. They negate the need to clean out poop and whatnot. Your most common cuc will be springtails (tiny tiny little creatures that jump around and eat mould and decaying waste) and isopods (small crustaceans with lots of legs, commonly known as rolly pollys, pillbugs or woodlice, they eat all kinds of decaying material and mould). You will probably also end up with detritivorous mites (little reddish brown near spherical mites) and little hairlike worms. They just seem to find their way into BioVs.

Springtails

Springtails are very small, jumping creatures (1-3mm long usually), usually white, grey or brown.

Where do I get springtails?

There are a few ways to acquire springs. You can purchase them from a shop or someone selling a culture of them (you'll commonly find these on places like gumtree, craigslist or Facebook marketplace) or you can collect them from the wild. If you or someone you know has a worm farm or compost pile, there are probably springtails in it. Place a dish on top of the soil or compost, place a banana peel or a couple mushrooms onto it, and leave it for about a day.

Hold your bait above a bowl of water and blow gently onto it. Springtails will probably jump off. Place the bait into the water and swish it around a little. Springtails are very tiny and will float atop the water. You can collect them with a spoon or something similar and dump them into the tank. Look closely before you put them into the tank to make sure you're not bringing other critters with them. Springs look like this;

and will usually jump away if you blow on them.

You can use the same bait and water thing by placing the bait somewhere damp and dark outside with decaying leaves and waiting a couple hours for them to gather. If you don't want the risk of hitch-hikers or other uninvited critters, they're not very expensive to buy. You only need like 30 to start a nice colony in a small tank, but get as many as you can.

How do you keep springtails healthy and happy?

Ignore them, basically. They need damo surroundings to breathe but otherwise they'll just happily wander the tank eating little moulds and snail poops and such. They're often in/under the soil so you may not see them often. Very unobtrusive.

Isopods

aka rolly pollys, aka pillbugs, aka woodlice, aka

friends

isopods are very cute and very helpful. They're actually a crustacean.

Where do I acquire isopods?

Like with springtails, you can buy them or forage them. Many isopod breeders have very fun species of pod that have cool colours and funky patterns, there's some that look like little rubber duckies, and they're very cute. Ideally get 15+ to start. Again, gumtree, fb marketplace or Craigslist are good places, or online bug stores.

Foraging them is a bit easier than springtails because they're large enough to handle. Anywhere there's decaying leaves and wood, there is also probably pods. Shuffle around dead leaves, and just gently pick them up either with your fingers or with a plastic spoon or something similar. Be gentle! Don't take hundreds of them, unless they're invasive, to avoid messing with the ecosystem around them. They are important.

How do I keep isopods healthy and happy?

Fairly simple. A standard snail tank is pretty ideal for these guys. They need moisture to breathe, and they like eating dead leaves. An important note is that they need protein and calcium, or they will begin to eat each other. They very much like fish food flakes, and dead bugs. Just put a little extra protein in the tank when you give your snails their protein. You should have a cuttlebone available at all times anyway, so they will use that for calcium. I've also found they enjoy some crushed eggshell sprinkled around. They will often indulge in sweet potato, mushroom and other veggies you feed your snails. These guys love to dig, so until the population is quite large you may not see them often. They like to hitch rides atop snails shells because they can't climb smooth glass on their own lol.

Introduction to the tank

To be honest with you, just dump your cuc in there. They'll wander off and sort themselves out. If you haven't yet got your snails, wait like a month or so for them to grow their population, feeding them things like mushroom (a springtail favourite) and fish flakes. If you already have the snails you can skip that but you may need to give the cuc a hand to keep things clean (scooping out poops and such) until they have their population high enough to keep the tank clean themselves. Once they're established, they're pretty self sustaining.

Side note;

If you have very small or baby snails, that are smaller than isopods, just add springtails and skip the pods. They're not particularly violent and likely wouldn't actively kill a snail but I wouldn't risk it.

Aight, this took much longer than I expected but here we are. Bioactive vivariums are excellent. The point of a BioVs (I'm shortening it now lol) is to recreate a tiny ecosystem within your pet's enclosure. The best benefit, in my opinion, is that your clean up crew/custodians (small bugs I'll explain in part 2) are detritivores who will consume decaying material and waste products from your pets. Essentially, you will not have to clean snail poop out of the tank. A naturalistic miniature ecosystem will also encourage the snails to enjoy natural behaviours like burrowing!

Supply list;

Tank or enclosure

Small (2-4cm diameter) pebbles or clay spheres

Fly screen or other tough mesh fabric

Substrate (my favourite is coco peat/coir mixed with a handful of perlite and a handful of coco bark/chips)

Leaf litter (oak, maple, beech etc)

Custodial creatures (isopods and springtails)

Plants and decor, if you so desire.

Setup

BioVs take a bit of setup. You will begin with your first step; a drainage layer.

Snails and slugs need a damp and humid environment. A side effect of misting them regularly is that substrate can become waterlogged and swampy. The decay of waste products will turn from aerobic bacteria (the bacteria you want, these guys need oxygen to live and function) to anaerobic bacteria (not so good. these guys are very smelly and can give off their own potentially harmful waste products) if the substrate becomes too swampy.

This is avoided with your drainage layer!

Head to a hardware store or a pet store, hardware stores are usually the cheaper option here, and buy a nice bag of pebbles. 2-4cm in diameter is roughly what you want here. You can also get these small clay spheres, but theyre harder to find. Spread them on the bottom of the tank or enclosure in a nice, even layer. The depth of this layer is up to you, but I would make sure it's at least a couple cm to make room for excess water.

Place a piece of fly screen large enough to cover all the pebbles on top of them. If you wanna get fancy you can find a firmer plastic mesh, but a fly screen works just fine. use another 8 pebbles to hold the edges and corners down.

There you have it, that's your drainage layer. This is where excess water will travel to, rather than swamping up your substrate. You might want to acquire some kind of syringe or pipette to get water out of there if too much is in there but I don't bother. If there's a pool in my drainage layer I just don't mist for a while and let it wick up or evaporate.

Your next step is your substrate. You have a bit of a fork in the road here, as to whether you want a planted vivarium, with live plants, or simply a regular viv, with decor as you choose. If you want to plant your vivarium, you will need to create a few layers. I would do a gravel layer, a coco peat/coir layer and a top layer of some sphagnum moss. I'm not very experienced in planted vivs so I will leave that at that, but there are many excellent tutorials online.

For a plain vivarium, I made a simple mix of coco coir, perlite, and a small handful of coco bark/chips. The perlite and bark help create air pockets to keep the soil aerated. Fill the tank with your substrate to a depth of your choosing. For snails, the minimum depth would be deep enough for the largest snail in the tank to entirely bury themselves.

Next, some leaf litter as a topper. Leaf litter simply refers to fallen leaves that have dried and begun to decay. Oak, maple and beech are some safe leaves, and you can often find bags of these in reptile or insect keeping stores, in person or online. If you collect leaves from outside, make sure it's a good distance away from roads to avoud pollution, that there are no pesticides or herbicides around, and that you freeze the leaves for 48 hours prior to putting them inside the tank to avoid unwanted hitchhikers. Try to shake off any bugs on the leaves before freezing them to avoid unnecessarily killing them. You don't need to completely cover the top of the substrate with leaf litter, but you will need at least a section, as some of your clean up crew are very fond of leaf litter and use it as a nutrient source.

Alright, I don't want this post getting 4km long, so this can be part 1 of 2. In the next part, I'll talk about the lovely custodial/clean up crew/janitorial critters used in BioVs, how to find them, and how to keep them healthy! Thank you very much for reading!

Hello I'm finally back! I'm gonna run over a few things you can feed your snails, and things to avoid. Let's gooo

SAFE FOODS

Most vegetables, some good ones are carrot, pumpkin, sweet potato, spinach (see calcium section below), broccoli, corn.

Most fruits, some good ones are apple, pear, banana, peach.

Certain herbs. Safe ones include coriander (cilantro), basil, mintand dill.

Mushroom (don't feed wild mushrooms, stick with ones from stores)

Cooked oats

Egg

Wet cat or dog food (LOOK AT THE INGREDIENTS. get organic and avoid high sodium)

Goldfish flakes (again, look at ingredients. some have garlic and salt, do not feed these!)

Small amounts of unseasoned raw meat

Certain outdoor plants. Ribwort and Broadleaf plantain, dandelion (see calcium section below), grass, chickweed, clover, marigold flowers and rose petals are some safe ones. If in doubt or you can't 100% positively identify the plant, just don't feed it to them. Make absolutely sure there are no herbicides or pesticides.

Algae wafers/tabs for aquatic snails. Feed in moderation but can be good as a backup food if you have no produce!!

UNSAFE FOODS

you need to absolutely avoid these!! they can seriously harm or kill your snail.

Anything salty. for obvious reasons. salt draws out the moisture they need to live

Anything sugary. Sugar has a similar effect to salt.

Processed foods. This will essentially avoid the first two things, as processed foods are usually very high in salt and/or sugar. Includes meats like ham, bacon, etc.

Anything with garlic or onion. Both dangerous to snails. This includes other things in the garlic/onion family like chives, leeks, shallots, spring onions etc.

Starchy foods or things made of grains. This includes pasta, rice, bread, and such. Starchy things absorb water and expand inside the stomach and can cause impaction (a blockage in the digestive system), dehydration and death.

Certain vegetables - Celery, leek, rhubarb.

Certain fruits - Citrus (Orange, lemon, lime), Avocado, Chilli peppers (bell pepper or capsicum is fine, just not spicy ones)

Canned foods. Canned foods, even vegetables or fruit, are preserved with high amounts of sugar or salt.

EXTRA NOTES

Just some important things about snail feeding and nutrition!!

Calcium

Snails ALWAYS need a calcium source available. the best option is cuttlebone, you can get this in pet stores, usually in the bird section. Don't collect cuttlebone off the beach, it will be full of salt. If you don't have cuttlebone yet, finely crushed hen eggshells is okay, but I would only use that short term.

You can make a calcium "brick" out of pure calcium powder for reptiles by adding a little water, shaping it then leaving to dry. Make sure there aren't any other additives if you do this.

Don't sprinkle calcium powder, cuttlebone powder or eggshells onto their food. They will eat the calcium as they need it, and giving them too much can cause a condition similar to kidney stones and can be dangerous. Just keep the calcium available 24/7.

Be wary with kale, dandelion leaves and spinach. They are quite nutritious but high in oxalates which can interfere with calcium absorption. Feed only once or twice a month, and in small amounts.

Protein

Snails need protein once or twice per week.

Protein rich foods include:

Beans, spirulina, peas, sunflower, hemp and pumpkin seeds, lentils.

Eggs, raw meat, cat or dog food.

Bloodworms, mealworms or crickets (dried, frozen or freshly killed, live bugs can bite)

Fish food and algae wafers/tabs

MISCELLANEOUS

Some foods are better than others. Things like lettuce and salad leaves as well as cucumber, watermelon and zucchini are mostly just water and don't have many nutrients. Give in small amounts a couple times a month.

On a similar note, snails have been knows to get "addicted" to cucumber and refuse to eat anything else, becoming malnourished and starving. Feed very rarely and with caution, as a treat.

Higher nutrient foods are: Carrot, sweet potato, mushroom and broccoli. Sweet potato and mushroom are the main staples of my snail's diet.