I love all my pet snails! These are just some of them! In the first picture is (from right to left) Grizelda, Hazel (above), Patchy (below), and Olive, and in the second picture is Gerald. The first four are mystery snails, a species of freshwater snail, and Gerald is a garden snail.
Gerald in his picture is sporting his horny head lump, which is used by snails to try and attract mates by emitting a scent (apparently). He’s currently trying to woo his tank mate Geraldina but she is completely ignoring him so far
I’m not sure if anyone wants snail breeding updates but I’m going to burden them with you anyway.
I’ve had a few clutches that have managed to hatch. I need to get a better technique down because if the eggs get too wet they drown, some might be infertile anyway and some take weeks and weeks to hatch, which feels like forever.
For reference my population of starting snails included one brown (A_Y_S), a few purples (A_yyS_) and some Ivory (aayyss). I had not initially sexed the snails because it’s difficult to do depending on how the snail is feeling. Essentially a healthy male can be identified, but you can’t tell the difference between a female or a male who feels a bit poorly, unless you catch them laying eggs.
I have confirmed one of the ivory snails is female.
And there must be one ivory male in there as well, because one clutch seems to be 100% ivory. This is excellent for messing around with genetics to have a pair of triple homozygous recessives.
All the white dots among the black gravel seem to be true ivory mystery snails. They’re all born pretty pale but develop colour as they grow.
There are also a few purples around, and one clutch that appeared to be 100% brown.
I have not seen any Blues (A_yyss) or Magenta (aayySs)
Which means so far I have to assume all these snails were homozygous as I haven’t seen any mixed clutches.
But! It means those brown snails have a 50% chance of having one ivory parent, which would make them the coveted AaYySs genotype. And that’s what I’m trying to get, because crossing that back to ivory produces clutches which have every colour mystery snail in even ratios
Hard to photograph, but at this stage the older baby snails look like little glass beads cruising around the tank.
Some colours seem to develop faster than others, so the purple pigment developed first but one that I thought was purple is now turning brown, and I still haven’t seen any color develop in the body of any of them, and the odds of throwing all pale bodies from these crosses is very unlikely.
But they are growing. A few batches are all mixed in so I can’t do punnet squares yet, but they are surviving
So after significant trial and error trying to hatch these clutches, I finally have a small success!
Leaving clutches in the big tank didn’t work- food too far away, adults dislodge the clutches and angelfish being angelfish
An isolated nursery tank didn’t work - too far away from food and not enough mulm
A breeder box filled with Java moss in the big tank kind of works, as long as an adult snails don’t knock everything around, which happens every few days
So I currently have a test clutch loosely suspended over my guppy fry tank, and it seems to work! They hatch on their own, but then disappear into the plants. But now I’ve definitely actually seen one, out there being alive.
It’s definitely got a purple shell, but I don’t know if the foot will stay white or not. I’m hoping it does, because that would mean at least one of my snails is a heterozygote and that means fun genetics times.
But I still need space to hatch clutches separately for proper genetic fun.
And a fresh batch of ??? colour mystery snails.
They’ve got enough spots that they won’t be ivory, might turn out purple or brown/chestnut? Now to watch them disappear into the tank and see what comes out in a few weeks.
So after significant trial and error trying to hatch these clutches, I finally have a small success!
Leaving clutches in the big tank didn’t work- food too far away, adults dislodge the clutches and angelfish being angelfish
An isolated nursery tank didn’t work - too far away from food and not enough mulm
A breeder box filled with Java moss in the big tank kind of works, as long as an adult snails don’t knock everything around, which happens every few days
So I currently have a test clutch loosely suspended over my guppy fry tank, and it seems to work! They hatch on their own, but then disappear into the plants. But now I’ve definitely actually seen one, out there being alive.
It’s definitely got a purple shell, but I don’t know if the foot will stay white or not. I’m hoping it does, because that would mean at least one of my snails is a heterozygote and that means fun genetics times.
But I still need space to hatch clutches separately for proper genetic fun.
I got some purple snails a little while ago, and I recently sought out a few ivory snails, for cross breeding purposes. And was given some extras.
4 ivory snails, two more purple, and one brown/black.
Now my plan, the original plan, was to cross a purple to a gold, which should produce a triple heterozygote… to then cross to ivory. Because in theory that cross should produce every color morph.
But now, I know the bonus brown snail has a gold gene. I don’t know whether it’s a heterozygote at all, and I only have two tanks set up to put these snails in.
And now I have one clutch.
In that tank there are the brown, two purples and two ivory. I’m hoping one of the parents was an ivory for some nice heterozygotes, but it was so soon after I acquired them that the snail may have been fertilised in another tank. So I just have to wait and hope these are fertile.
And then, then I can do some punnet squares to figure out who the parents are.
