Snail Care Question

[mistymists]

SO have bought a golden mystry snail from petsmart awhile back and now it's turned white. I can't figure out why and my google efforts have turned up nothing. Any ideas as to what I can do. It's shell is starting to look brittle.

[dennysfishroom]

I've heard you can use cuttlebone to strengthen the snails shells. Same as used for birds. Can't vouch for it, but I think I did try it many years ago when I had Mystery snails. Denny

[mewickham]

If the water is too soft or too acid, snails have problems building their shells. The shells can actually be eaten away by such water. Increasing the calcium content (general hardness) of the water is the solution. Denny's cuttlebone solution might work. It contains the right stuff, but cuttlebones float as I recall. The more typical solution is to add some crushed coral or dolomite either to your substrate or into a nylon mesh bag in your filter system. A quicker way would be to add a bit of calcium chloride to the water, but that does reduce the carbonate hardness as a side effect.

The real question with any of these methods is how much to add? You need a general hardness test kit to measure the result. And will harder water have a detrimental effect on other species in the tank? I seem to recall that you had guppies and ghost shrimp. They wouldn't be hurt at all by harder water.

Another consideration is with your particular snail. It's possible that much of the yellow color comes not from the shell, but from the meat of the snail showing through. So a diet change may be in order. I'm not sure what to recommend in that regard.