peas
Achatina fulica
Posts: 10
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Post by peas on Mar 1, 2017 9:10:00 GMT
How long has it been like that? Not long ago I had a snail that randomly stopped eating, growing and doing much of anything despite it's tank mate being fine.
With mine it took them like two weeks or so before they started being active again and nothing really had changed. No idea why it happened, but I can understand your stress. One thing I did do is that every few days I would give the snail a bath.
Coconut fiber (or coco coir as it's called sometimes) is a great substrate, I use it for a lot of my exotics.
Though one thing you should definitely want to do is getting the tank temperature up a few degrees, 20-23 degrees is perfect for an A. Fulica but A. Reticulata need slightly higher temps try to get it to 25-28. Some people recommend sticking a heat mat on the outside if you have a glass terrarium, but as I use a wooden enclosure what I did was move my tank to a warm room in the house (smaller, radiator reasonably close but not too close to the tank).
Humidity sounds good though. Try not to let it get too swampy though if you're spraying so often with 99% humidity. 80% is good for retics.
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peas
Achatina fulica
Posts: 10
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Post by peas on Mar 1, 2017 8:47:11 GMT
I house two A. Fulica in an enclosure that's 3 ft by 1.5 ft. It's probably over kill but it's nice to give them as much space as possible rather than keeping them in a tiny box. Also, I don't think a mirror would do anything for the snails. You can work out the *minimum* size tank you would need for your snails here too: www.petsnails.co.uk/snail-calc.php
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peas
Achatina fulica
Posts: 10
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Post by peas on Mar 1, 2017 8:39:36 GMT
Ha, yea same. If it wasn't for the 100 mile distance I'd have happily taken them off your hands. Hard to find achatina achatina nearby.
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peas
Achatina fulica
Posts: 10
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Post by peas on Feb 10, 2017 9:27:31 GMT
If it's a snail species native or non-invasive to were you live then you can just let them go, if it's non-native then you should freeze the eggs.
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peas
Achatina fulica
Posts: 10
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Post by peas on Feb 7, 2017 13:22:26 GMT
Ah okay, that makes sense. Yeah they're not not even a year old yet.
Cool!
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peas
Achatina fulica
Posts: 10
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Post by peas on Feb 6, 2017 14:47:04 GMT
Two days ago I was greeting to a nice sight when I checked on my snails, a single pearly white egg on the surface of the leaf litter.
So today I set about finding the other eggs because we all know the if there's one egg there's bound to be more. However I only found one other egg that was buried, the buried egg was by itself and not in the clutch like the first egg.
I turned that substrate inside-out much to the displeasure of my cleanup crew but couldn't find any other eggs at all.
How common is this for a GALS to just lay two eggs in two completely different locations? Since everything online seems to say it's always a clutch of like 30+.
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peas
Achatina fulica
Posts: 10
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Post by peas on Feb 1, 2017 2:33:42 GMT
Hi, I have a bit of a concern about one of my GALS. I keep two A. Fulica in the same tank, one is behaving normally, eating cuttlefish, food, being active before I've gone to bed has a decent band of fresh yellow growth to show it's still growing. The other was like this too until about a week or so ago.
This snail sleeps through most of the night as I'm awake until 3am and see no activity and they either haven't moved when I wake up or if they have it's not been long that they've been awake for. The fresh yellow band growth is almost gone. They're never on the cuttlefish. But they will come out if I spray them and may stay up for like an hour or so, which I managed to coax it to eat a bit of mushroom for like 2 minutes before it went back to sleep.
One thing that I think could be it is that I have way too many springtails, they're often on the snails shells and under the rim or on the mantle, and occasionally on the foot. These *are* springtails and not mites like in the previous post as they're springtails I seeded into the tank and are also on the walls and floor, they have beyond exploded which is something I'd like to solve too but not really sure how. So I'm thinking it could be stressing this snail out too much since it must be really annoying to have all these little bugs running on you, but the other doesn't seem to care.
Another thing is that I added leaf litter by way of oak leaves from dartfrog.co.uk in there recently but I'm not sure if it was before or after the slow decline started. But I dunno why oak leaves would stop it doing stuff.
I doubt it's the environment like humidity and temperature as both are fine and the other snail again has no issues with them.
Any ideas?
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peas
Achatina fulica
Posts: 10
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Post by peas on Jan 27, 2017 9:58:27 GMT
Hm okay, well I guess that's a little less worrying! Guess I'll just keep an eye on them, making sure they don't start going in and out the pneumostome before I go and buy 10,000 hypoaspis miles.
Or I could try to find some kind of person I could send/bring some too to get them properly ID'd, though not really what what.
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peas
Achatina fulica
Posts: 10
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Post by peas on Jan 26, 2017 15:49:35 GMT
Yeah, they're definitely not strikingly snow white. They are white-ish but it's more of an orange-white.
They're just quite fast and mite shaped and looking so I can only assume they're some kind of mite which probably can't be a good sign.
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peas
Achatina fulica
Posts: 10
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Post by peas on Jan 26, 2017 14:09:08 GMT
Last night I took my snails out of their house and noticed that they had a few tiny little mites running around their shells. They are tiny, smaller than a dot. Round, vaguely orange coloured. Certainly not springtails (as I keep those already) as they did not jump when blown on lightly. However, the mites were mainly on the shells of the snails, and there weren't many, maybe 6 or so per snail that I could see and I have two snails. They weren't going in and out of the pneumostome from what I could tell (but the pneumostome was mostly closed when I was holding them), they also weren't really going on the body, a few were. But still mostly on the shell. So I'm not 100% certain if these are parasitic yet or not. If they are parasitic the next problem comes is that my enclosure is very bio-active using springtails, woodlice and worms to keep the place fresh. So realistically I can't do a proper fully clean out, since the decor such as the cork logs have many woodlice living inside, and don't want to ruin the balance. Obviously I'd want to use hypoaspis miles if these mites are parasitic, would they do a good enough job of keeping the snails clear from mites even if I don't do the whole "nuke the enclosure from hell with a million hypoaspis and baking all decor"? Like if I bought a tub of 1000 and put them in. Another thing with hypoaspis comes with the bio-activity I already have, I love my little woodlice and would hate to have their babies predated on by the hypoaspis. So has anyone used hypoaspis is the same enclosure as woodlice to any ill effect? The woodlice are porcellionides pruinosus if that matters. Also, I already know they'll eat my springtails but how badly will they effect them? I already have quite a lot of springtails but would hypoaspis wipe them out or like severely limit their numbers that I end up needed to replace them? Here's a picture of one of the mites if anyone can maybe tell me if it is riccardoella limacum, or perhaps even some hypoaspis that came in for my springtails. Unfortunately they're so small it's hard to get a good picture, also that one looks quite white, but when I looked at them they were more orange-y to my eye. i.imgur.com/3EvBwzi.jpgOh yeah, I also found this website bioactiveherps.co.uk/ which sells hypoaspis in tubs of 1000 rather than the usual 10,000 which seems like a better number to me for my enclosure. Is this a decent site, has anyone used it before?
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