Bladder Snails Slime Trails?
Tonight's video is all about bladder snails. Specifically: Bladder Snail Slime Trails.
The truth is: These little snails are BENEFICIAL and they are extremely adaptable. They clean algae off your glass and hardscape. They help to remove leftover food and dying plants. Bladder Snails will completely ignore living plants.
I think they do this, refusing to eat live plants, as a way to promote their own survival. Physically they should be able to eat live plants but they choose not to do so. These plants clean their water, thus helping the bladder snails to survive. Not destroying those plants is a survival strategy and bladder snails are full of evolutionary tricks like that.
The negative stigma they receive in the hobby is more about the snails themselves. They are cheap to keep. Easy to breed and they're not very colorful. If you ran a pet shop you wouldn't make much money pushing bladder snails on customers.
Instead you push things you can make money on. Pets like mystery snails, nerites, and even ramshorn snails. All of which are colorful, thus meaning you can artificially inflate the price. Your average fish tank hobbyist knows only what they've been told by the industry.
Tonight we are looking at a new behavior in these physella snails. I've heard of ramshorn snails making a sort of "web" but nothing like that about bladder snails...
What you're looking at here is my 2 gallon nano tank. Aka the "Pond in a Jar" Playlist on YouTube:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-f50GJrcV9l0N7WTAObSYparGJCV-0zP
Here my bladder snails are eating their most favorite food item: Cucumber chunks 🐌 not so unusual to see but if you look closely there's a "bridge" connecting the cucumbers.
This is new behavior to me! I haven't seen them do this in over a year of close observation. Each snail reinforces the slime trail as they pass by. The trail becomes a way to conserve energy for diving, eating and digestion.
This is, in my opinion rare behavior in Physella Acuta, the common bladder snail. I call it the... slime highway!
My hypothesis: I believe these snails are using their natural slime to build improvised bridges between their food items. Each snail reinforces the slime bridge as they pass.
Making use of the slime highway becomes a way to save energy for eating and digestion. These paths remind me of an ant colony with their chemical scents trails. Each ant adding and reinforcing the scent trail as they go by.
This is my own aquarium method, using Nitella Characeae freshwater macroalgae as a bio filter. Gallon, No Filters, No Water Changes
Bladder Snails utilizing their slime trail in this way shows that these "pest" snails are more interesting than first appears. I've had a lot of fun studying them and keeping them in small snail focused aquariums.
The slime trail has the added advantage of anchoring the food item. This behavior could keep the snails from losing their food item in a slow moving stream or pond. At the very least, anchoring the food underwater like this would prevent other creatures from finding and eating it themselves.
Birds and other predators are less likely to notice the snails if they stay underwater. So it makes sense that the snails would have adaptations that helped to keep their food submerged. A decaying bit of fruit or flesh would be anchored like this in a very short time.
I'll be focusing more on these awesome aquatic "pests" in future posts. These bladder snails are a GIFT in your aquarium. They shouldn't be killed or removed with chemicals. Some fish like pea puffers even love to eat these snails.
For a video showing this behavior in action, please check this video: https://youtu.be/LEq6Zd5rius
You can purchase a kit to make an aquarium like this! Check my Etsy shop for details on the Pond in a Jar style of nano aquariums.
Etsy.com/shop/BucketPonds
And you'll have to forgive me, I've only just now started this blog! Still learning all the tricks to links and posting. Thank you ~BucketPonds
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