Prepared Foods for Snails

[Liguus]

I couldn't find much info about prepared foods so I thought I would start a thread for it. (I also didn't want to start posting all this in the recent "gel foods" thread).

I've seen some GALS sellers sell "snail cereal" but I'm not sure how common it is since I'm in the US. Does anyone feed their snails something other than the standard fruit/veg/dog food? I've been going through a few ideas on how to supplement my snails' diet, mainly with "gel" type foods, so that I can include more foods in their diet, while it being convenient at the same time.

What I've done so far is made a firm "gel" type food, which is really just a smoothie of banana, pear, blackberries, nettle powder, pumpkin seed, and oats. I figured solid food would be better than a paste so I added agar (basically a seaweed derived gelatin-like substance). Its a bit gray, probably due to the banana and oats. (I had hopes it would be a nice purple goo lol). I'm still messing around with the agar concentration and the amounts of the ingredients so that it holds together but isn't too firm at the same time. I may go back to a paste type food.

I also thought of making a few different types of this stuff: Fruit based, veg based, even maybe a "protein gel" potentially made from peanuts and dehydrated eggs. 

What do you guys think?

[Kocel]

Woa they are so cute :eek:

[jdjn13]

Looking good. It's nice to see people experimenting with ways to feed their snails. How did they take it?

[Liguus]

It's all gone this morning so I think they like it a lot. I will try to make a recipe with less "filler" next week.

[helenm]

I made made "snello" hehe for my aquatic snails. Basically purees and supplements with plain powdered gelatin. I set it in ice cube trays and froze it so it would keep pretty much forever.

Wait is agar gelatin?

[snugglebug]

I was thinking of doing something like that too! I was wondering if snails would actually eat that kind of slurry, good to know that they can. Good job!

Are your snails picky? I'm guessing that a larger variety of things in the mix is great for nutrition, but I worry that they might not touch it at all if it contains one or two things they don't normally eat or if they just don't like the taste of all these flavours mixed together (is this possible?)
I'll try to trick them into eating their greens (they don't seem to eat any leafy foods so far) by mixing it with carrot and other favourites, haha

[pearthesnail]

Awww so adorable! I bought some ‘snail mix' on eBay and gave some to my snails but I don't trust it as I gave it to Sonny and he got very ill afterwards- it probably wasn't the snail mix but I've never bought it again because I dont want to take any risks

[pearthesnail]

Also that gel food looks really good!

[Liguus]

I don't think I will make "gel" type foods anymore as the gelatin & agar seemed like a bunch of non-nutritious 'bulk' in the mix. I will still have to make prepared foods out of necessity though (i'm going to collect various florida tree snails species in about a week) but this time I plan on just making a thick smoothie-type paste every few days. I'm still thinking up an exact recipe.

[astana]

Sometimes I give my snails some pure vegetable/fruit smoothie. To make it thicker, I had to put in banana, blueberries, and carrots. Of course, I don't think that that is a substitute for gel, but there are foods that make mixes thicker.

[horrr0r]

What does anyone think about using tapioca (starch or boiled) to create the gel texture? Would that be more wholesome?