Re: !>>Note to mengerin

[Matthew William Mengerink <mengerin@cs.utexas.edu>]

>  Whoa, horsey, back.  What I'm sayiong is I lost some very valuable fish
>  to algae eaters and so I have decided to go with snails instead.  I'm
>  just looking for snails that won't eat my swordplants, or reproduce
>  really fast.  I bought a twenty gallon tank at a yard sale yesterday
>  that was still set-up, but completely dry.  It has a quarter inch of
>  dead pond snail shells on top of the gravel.  Venezualan Ramshorns
>  won't do that, and they are quite attractive.

Well, vice-versa, snails can increase rapidly in numbers, and if you were
to quite lighting the tank for a while and the food were to decrease (a
one week vacation where the lights blow), you're going to find yourself
with one very large biological load and nothing in the tank will make
it.  This has been reported before in several scenarios and I myself have
seen massive die off in snails.

However, what I was replying to was your claim about "algae eaters" not
being acceptable tankmates with small fish.  Otos are compatible with
anything that won't eat them.

				Cheers,
				Matthew