Gold rabbit snail

Care at a glance

Overview

Gold rabbit snails are slow, peaceful grazers with a yellow body and a long brown shell, and they spend their time creeping over surfaces and sifting the substrate for algae, biofilm, and soft leftovers. They mix calmly with fish, shrimp, and other snails, and a single snail is content on its own. They breed slowly, dropping one baby at a time, so they will not crowd a tank. Give them warm, hard, alkaline water and a soft sand bed to forage in, and keep copper out, since it is toxic to snails. A tank of 60 liters or more suits their size and grazing.

In the wild

Rabbit snails come only from the ancient lakes and connected rivers of Sulawesi in Indonesia, where the water is warm, hard, and alkaline year round. The gold form thrives when a tank matches that, with temperatures from about 24 to 28 c and a pH between 7 and 8.5. A deep bed of soft sand lets the snail burrow and graze the way it would in the lakes, and driftwood, rock, and hardy plants complete the scene. Steady mineral levels keep the shell from pitting or thinning.

Good to know

Tylomelania gemmifera is one of the Sulawesi rabbit snails in the family Pachychilidae. It reaches around 5 to 7 cm, with a long, ribbed, cone-shaped shell closed by a trapdoor operculum. Rather than laying eggs, rabbit snails are livebearers: the female carries her young internally and gives birth to a single large, fully formed juvenile at a time, usually every few weeks. That slow, low output makes them easy to manage but a patient project to breed in numbers.

Common questions

Related species

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• 

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• 

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• 

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• 

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• 

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