milk snail not eating & too weak to move? (kinda urgent)

[kkira]

hi all,

i’m recently a snail dad to 4 milk snails, the 5th (hachi) recently passed away two weeks ago

milk snails are proving to be a bit difficult for a beginner (lol), so i’ll probably be making a few more posts for help
my snails randomly stopped eating. i kept it moist, the hygrometer read 94% humidity (i’m assuming a 5% error margin or larger..), so i have no idea why. about two weeks ago, they returned to normal activity and eating

but my one snail, norman, didn’t. he has the largest shell out of all of them and i noticed that he was having trouble moving up the walls. he’d stretch his entire body out & i could see the motions of his foot against the glass— so he’s obviously trying to move, but his shell wouldn’t even lift off of the dirt.
i had removed him out of worry that he was too weak to move and set him in a small container to check his eating habits. i was eventually able to feed him carrot *only* by holding it to his mouth, so i assumed maybe i had accidentally made him associate my hand with food.

a week passed and that method didn’t work again, although he remained pretty active the entire time. he’d wake up frequently to explore (he only likes to play on the carrot pieces, lol. he just climbs on them.) he eventually ate quite a bit on his own at the end of the next week, so i reluctantly put him back in the main tank yesterday

and today i noticed he can’t move again, so i’m here. to recap, he only eats carrots once a week and rejects the sweet potato protein-based food. i’m going to try feeding him some leafy greens and/or corn later to see if he’s just being picky (spring mix doesn’t make them picky, right? i absolutely avoid lettuce and cucumbers, i only give dark coloured greens)

any other advice would be really appreciated, i’m worrying about his quality of life if he can’t even climb.

thanks,

kira

[morningcoffee]

Otala lactea are native to northern Africa and Spain, where they don't have super humid / moist conditions. Try keeping the humidity and moisture lower to mimic their natural habitat better.
They are also foliage feeders, so try giving leafy foods rather than root vegetables. Lettuce is fine for them to have, particularly darker lettuce varieties (Romaine, curly leaf, batavia, butter lettuce, little gem etc). Iceberg lettuce and cucumber are absolutely fine for snails in moderation.

What substrate are you using and how often do you clean the tank? Snails need a soil type substrate containing natural bacteria and soil flora to ingest as part of their digestion cycle (which is also why they don't need to eat every day). If you're cleaning the tank or giving clean substrate too often, this can lead to issues with eating.

[kkira]

oh, that’s my mistake. people emphasize 80-90% humidity and a warm temperature, so i was trying to emulate that. snail care is such a contradicting topic, lol

i’ll go back to feeding them leafy foods again and see if there’s a difference.

the substance is coir with sphagnum moss mixed in, i don’t change it, i just turn over the soil to check for eggs and wipe the sides of the tank with water (once a week)

(thank you!)

[axialgentleman]

Wow, I came to ask a very similar question. I have a mix of milk snails and garden snails. The garden snails have been thriving but the milk snails stay in their shells for weeks at a time (they might be coming out a night, but if so they're returning to the exact same position on the wall of the aquarium by morning). They've been this way for over a year -- one passed away but the other two are still coming out once in a while. I've tried much drier conditions but it doesn't seem to make a difference for them. I'll feed them some greens and see if they start coming out more often. If anyone has other hypotheses I could test, I'm open to experimenting!

So sorry to hear about Norman and Hachi, kkira. I hope Norman is doing a bit better.

[snaileyhammy]

Hey there!

From what you’ve explained, I don’t see a huge concern, which is good. Your snails could be refusing to eat for a couple different reasons, and pinpointing exactly what reason that is can be quite the task. Here is some information that might help you pinpoint that reason on your own www.petsnails.co.uk/problems/not-eating.html#start Your snails will usually get food when they need it. You should definitely spread the food around so they can find it, feed them more of those dark, leafy greens, and mess with the humidity and temperature to see if that helps. You might want to make the temperature/humidity drop a little and see if that helps, or raise it, and see if that helps. Let me know how that goes. And as for the snails being weak, that doesn’t sound like too big of a concern to me either. When you said you saw your snail climbing up the side of their terrarium, and they looked like they were struggling, it sounded pretty normal to me. Snails will stretch out like that to climb around, and hang from things. Sometimes their shells can weigh down, or pull them down, but it likely doesn’t bother them. Snails are quite strong, and can carry that big shell, even when it appears they cannot. So don’t worry too much about that, it sounds completely natural to me.

Let me know if you have any more questions or concerns! I also apologize if any of my information is false. I try my absolute best to give you quality information, but I am still learning myself!