So you’ve added some nerite snails to your aquarium, but now you’re stuck dealing with all of these nerite eggs. Nerite snails are notorious for laying a lot of eggs all over the decorations and glass of your aquarium.
What should you do if you have nerite eggs all over your aquarium?
You can limit the amount of nerite snail eggs that show up in your aquarium by only getting male nerite snails.
It can be hard to tell the sex of your snails, so a quick trick is to hold the snails in a quarantine tank for at least a month to see if they start laying eggs on their own before introducing them to your aquarium.
You can also use nerite snails in freshwater to ensure that the eggs can hatch into new snails.
Cleaning nerite snail eggs off the glass is pretty easy. All you need to do is scrape them off with an aquarium safe tool like a stainless steel razor blade.
Just don’t forget to change the water. Let’s take a look at what you should do if you have any nerite snail eggs in your aquarium.
What Do Nerite Snail Eggs Look Like?
There’s a lot of interesting things about nerite eggs and one of the biggest ones is how they look. Nerite snail eggs look like little sesame seeds that cling to the hard surfaces inside of your tank.
They are often white or opaque and color which makes them easier to spot against dark surfaces like filters, logs, and even the walls of your tank.
What you’re seeing when you look at nerite snail eggs isn’t actually the eggs themselves, but a case that contains somewhere between 100 and 300 individual nerite eggs.
When you start seeing those little white dots pop up in your aquarium, you’re actually looking at thousands and thousands of individual nerite eggs grouped together.
We can’t see the individual nerite eggs with the naked eye and can only see them under a microscope. It’s very easy to spot clusters of nerite eggs because of how snails lay them.
Some snails lay their eggs in clusters so all of the eggs will be hanging out together in one large ball. However, nerite snails lay their eggs all over the aquarium which means you’ll see little white dots popping up on every surface that’s hard enough to support one.
This often causes a problem for owners who like keeping their aquariums clean and don’t like the sight of hundreds of nerite eggs on every surface. The good news is that there are several things you can do to manage the amount of nerite snail eggs in your aquarium.
What Should You Do If You Have Nerite Snail Eggs Hatching In Your Aquarium?
Here’s a big question that’s a little bit more challenging than might look on its surface. What should you do if you find a nerite snail eggs hatching in your aquarium?
This answer comes down to what you should do with your aquarium and the goals you have for your set up. We’re going to look at two options which involve keeping the eggs or trying to get rid of them.
Nerite snail eggs can be really fun to have as part of your aquarium and, in fact, there are even individuals who exclusively raise nerite snails as the main attraction in their aquariums. It’s a fun project to help nerite snails go through their entire life cycle from adults, to eggs, to larvae.
One option you have if you start seeing nerite snail eggs popping up in your aquarium is to simply keep them there and start hatching some nerite snails of your own.
However, some individuals don’t like having nerite snails in their aquariums. These snails tend to lay their eggs all over the place and under the right conditions they can lay dozens of eggs if not more.
This winds up creating a big visual distraction that many aquarium owners can find unpleasant. You can also try removing the nerite snail eggs in order to improve the visual appeal of your aquarium.
We’re going to go over a few methods of stopping these snails from leaving eggs all over your aquarium.
How To Stop Nerite Snails From Laying Eggs?
One of the first things you can consider doing is stopping your nerite snails from laying eggs in your aquarium in the first place.
This one’s a very big challenge because nerite snails are considered survivors and very hardy species which means that they will lay eggs in just about any aquarium you put them in.
There are a few tricks you can do to make sure that they’re not laying eggs in your aquarium. These can be making sure that there are only male nerite snails in your aquarium, changing the conditions of the water, and limiting the food that the snails have access to.
It’s very hard to sex any type of snail and that’s because most species of snails are hermaphroditic which means that both male and female snails can lay eggs and that they can reproduce asexually.
However, nerite snails have male and female genders that are required to produce offspring. If you’re looking to stop your nerite snails from laying eggs, you can make sure that you only have male nerite snails in your tank.
Male nerite snails have a small fold of skin around their right and antenna. This is the only way to tell these genders apart.
Another option is to change the conditions in the aquarium. Female nerite snails will lay more eggs if the conditions are promising than if they’re not.
You can limit the amount of food nerite snails have access to by regularly cleaning your tank and making sure your algae buildup isn’t too excessive.
Keeping your nerite snails in freshwater won’t stop them from laying eggs, but it will make sure that the eggs can’t hatch into new nerite snails.
How To Hatch Nerite Snail Eggs!
If you want to keep your nerite snails, you’re going to need to learn how to hatch them. Hatching nerite snail eggs comes down to understanding what makes this species of snail thrive.
You can either make changes to your aquarium to ensure that your nerite snails have the best possible environment or you can move the nerite snail eggs into a makeshift nursery that allows you to hatch them under better conditions.
Let’s take a look at how you can hatch nerite snail eggs using these two strategies.
In order to make your aquarium a good habitat for hatching nerite snail eggs, it’s going to need to be full of brackish water.
While nerite snails are capable of surviving in fresh or saltwater, the eggs of these snails can only successfully hatch if they are in brackish water. This is because the larvae of nerite snails require salty water in order to form their shells.
Eggs will either not hatch or the larvae will quickly perish if they hatch in freshwater.
One of the best things you can do is transfer the freshly laid nerite snail eggs over to their own enclosure. This lets you focus on giving them the best possible conditions to hatch without disturbing the rest of your aquarium.
Make sure that they’re in a warm, slightly brackish water that has plenty of algae built up for the young snails when they hatch. You should also make sure that the pH is around 7 to ensure that the nerite snail larvae have the best environment in order to build shells. They prefer water that is slightly hard.
How To Remove Nerite Snail Eggs From Your Aquarium!
Nerite snails can lay hundreds of eggs under the right circumstance which means that your aquarium can go from neat and clean to covered in snail eggs in a matter of days.
Removing nerite eggs is a priority for individuals who are looking to keep their tanks nice and clean. However, it can be tricky to remove nerite snails that lay eggs because these snails lay their eggs everywhere.
We’ll go over two easy options you have for getting rid of nerite snail eggs that are in your aquarium.
The first option involves scraping them off of whatever surfaces the nerite snails have laid their eggs on. You should use a clean, stainless steel razor blade to scrape the nerite snail eggs off of any filters, logs, or any other decorations that they lay their eggs on.
Make sure that you’re using aquarium safe cleaning tools when you’re working to remove these eggs. Nerite snail eggs are notoriously difficult to remove from services so you’re going to have your work cut out for you.
Prevention is one of the best policies when it comes to removing nerite snail eggs. One of the best things you can do to get the nerite eggs out of your aquarium is to stop them from getting there in the first place.
Switching over to only male nerite snails, changing of the environment to limit the amount of eggs they lay, or switching to a different species of snails are great ways to mitigate nerite snail eggs. You can also consider adding some fish that eat nerite snail eggs to your aquarium.
What Eats Nerite Snail Eggs?
You might be thinking it’s an easy fix to add some fish to your aquarium that eat nerite snail eggs. After all, if you had this problem with mystery snails, apple snails, or other species of snails the solution is simply to get fish that eat their eggs.
However, as it turns out, there are very few species of fish that will actually go out of their way to eat nerite snail eggs. Fish like clown loaches, pufferfish, and Betta fish will eat the right snail eggs, but they will also get the snails themselves.
Nerite snail eggs are very difficult to remove from aquariums and often require scrubbing or using a razor blade to peel them off. If it’s hard work for people to get the nerite snail eggs out of their aquariums, it’s also hard for predators to eat them.
Fish often go for the snail eggs that are easier to consume rather than ones that are going to take a lot of work. The fish that eat the nerite snail eggs will also try to find easier meals in the aquarium before settling for these hard to eat eggs.
These fish also have another major drawback and that’s that they eat the nerite snails themselves. In fact, it’s easier for some of these fish to eat fully grown, adult nerite snails than it is for them to try and eat their eggs.
You might wind up in a situation where you have a bunch of nerite eggs as well as fish that are now eating your snails. Getting a species of fish that eats nerite snail eggs should be considered a last-ditch effort to solve your problem.
How To Remove Nerite Snail Eggs On Glass!
Now let’s talk about getting your nerite snail eggs off the glass of your aquarium. It’s one thing if your snails start laying nerite eggs on logs and other decorations, but when they start with a glass it can obstruct the view of the rest of your aquarium.
Here’s the good news, it’s easier to get nerite snail eggs off of glass than it is to get it off of any other surface in your aquarium. All you need to do is peel the eggs off using a razor blade and then just scoop them out of the aquarium or clean your aquarium’s water.
Nerite eggs on glass are the easiest situation you can have when it comes to removing these snail eggs. The process is very simple and it starts with you getting a razor blade or another scraper that is aquarium safe.
It’s important to use aquarium safe tools when cleaning nerite eggs from your tank in order to ensure that you don’t contaminate or damage the other creatures living in your aquarium. All you need to do is carefully scrape the glass and the nerite eggs will come right off.
You’re going to want to make sure that you clean the water after removing the right snail eggs. It might be the case that you remove the eggs, but they remain fully intact and can later hatch into new nerite snails.
Changing your water and cleaning out the nerite snail eggs you can scoop out will help prevent new snails from hatching in their place.
Conclusion
Nerite snails are some of the most interesting snails to add to your aquarium, but nerite eggs can pose a serious challenge for people looking to keep their aquariums clean and limit the amount of snails that have. You can prevent new nerite eggs from forming by only having male snails or changing the conditions of the water in your aquarium. You can also clean out your nerite eggs by scraping them off of surfaces and changing the water.
