I just moved another half-cup of babie snails out of the nursery and into the big tank. Actually it was more like a quarter-cup but they don’t all stay still at the bottom. “The contents of this package may have shifted during transportation.”

The pic shows them and their cup floating around in the big tank, doing the whole “adjust to the new temperature and water” thing. I counted out thirty of them. With the sixty I moved over earlier, that’s 90 babies now in the big tank…. and over a hundred still in the nursery tank.

Once they’d had enough time to adjust, someone came along and tipped over the cup…

I tried to take a head-count of the baby snails. Just on one half of the tank, counting the snails on the walls and in view on the bottom, I got to one hundred. With about the same number on the other half of the tank, that means somewhere around 200 babies in there… Yikes!

This is what a hundred newborn baby snails look like:

Ok I don’t know if it’s an even hundred – I didn’t count them. This is just some of the snails from the second clutch. Not all of them. The first clutch isn’t included at all.

All them little dots are alive and looking for food. And when they find food – then all them little dots start pooping. And someday, if they all survive, each of them little dots will require 2 1/2 gallons of water, plus regular maintenance…

AAAAUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH!

Just got home from a long, exhausting, stressful day at work, to discover that the second snail-egg-clutch was all busy hatching.

Lots of wee little snail babies in the breeding net. They all look like more golden babies, like the first lot.

I’m too tired though to get excited and take pictures and stuff.

Oh No!

So when I got home from work, I looked and the clutch hadn’t changed at all. Like an idiot, I poked it and it fell off the filter and broke. Some babies spilled out but they weren’t moving…. :-O

I thought I’d killed it, but put it on some foam in the tank just in case. Then I realized they were moving! The babies were moving towards the water!

So I kept watching and there were more babies – the egg clutch was sort of hollow, as if they had been hatching inwards to the middle of it instead of outward. Now I’ve been sitting and watching the wee babies moving into the water – it’s amazing!

I even saw one go parasnailing! Fresh-hatched and it was parasnailing! It slowly went into the water then spread its wee foot out, let go, and gently glided downwards in a spiral. Tee-hee!

Babies!

There’s still two clutches, I’ve left them where they are to let them incubate where the snail(s) put them.

The first clutch is now two weeks old. It’s awkwardly placed on the back of a filter, and I don’t think I’d be able to get it off without damaging it anyways. When it hatches, the babies will just drop down into the tank I guess. The first clutch is the larger one, being over 2 inches long I think.

First Clutch, 2 weeks along

It could just be wishful thinking, but it looks to me that the clutch is starting to turn colour, and I can see what I think are black spots in some of the eggs – little dark coloured babies maybe?

With luck, the first clutch will hatch some time in the next week or so – I’ve read 3 weeks is a common incubation period.

The second clutch is in a better spot for watching and dealing with – I could put a net breeder under it, or even try and knock it off into a net, if I wanted to put the babies somewhere else.

If 3 weeks is the magic number, then the second one has about another fortnight to go.

Second Clutch, 1 week along.

The second clutch is small, only about an inch and a half long, and a half inch around.

I think my big blue snail is loaded with eggs! The past two nights, after dark she has hauled herself up out of the water and has been searching around the top of the aquarium. In my limited experience, they just don’t do that for the heck of it – full size apple snails aren’t exactly graceful out of the water. I imagine for them, it’s like lugging around 300 or 400 pounds of scuba equipment – managable and easy underwater, but ungainly and massive in the air. So for her to climb straight up out of the water, and another 3 inches or so to the top, then search all around, she must have some serious business to attend to.

Read more »