Let's say you really love the mystery snails and you want to breed them—how are you going to do that? Well, you need two—you need a male and a female. Actually, the males tend to stay a little bit smaller than the females do.

So maybe what you might do is go out and get yourself five or six of them, throw them in a tank—again, I like 20 gallons or above, especially for breeding, because you could potentially have a lot of mystery snails that can produce a fair amount of waste, and so we don't want to have water quality issues.

Water quality issues will be easier to deal with if a tank is a little bit larger. For breeding, what I would do—again, you want a nice tight-fitting lid. I would also lower the water level, probably at least an inch or two from the surface of the top of the tank.

It's really important that that lid is tight-fitting because the eggs are always laid out of the water above the waterline. However, the eggs also need to stay moist—that works best when you have a nice tight-fitting lid and you've got water in the tank and the tank is very humid in the area where there is no water.

Baby Snail Care

Now the baby snails—there's really nothing in particular you have to do, like nothing special. They're just going to start doing what the adults do—and that is eating algae, detritus, dead leaves, and uneaten fish food.

If you're getting a lot of them—and you can have a cocoon that gives you a hundred, maybe more, at one time—it's actually quite surprising how many eggs can come out of a snail. You wouldn’t think it's possible, but they can produce a lot of eggs at a time.

Once you have those mystery snails, you're probably going to have to up your feeding.
The other thing that you may have to do is keep an eye on calcium levels in the tank and possibly provide some calcium supplements in the form of some type of snail food—just so that they're getting enough calcium. 

Because when you have 100 mystery snails and they're all growing, that can really put some pressure on your ecosystem. Other than that, there really aren't any issues with raising up the juveniles into full-grown mystery snails.

Lifespan and Problems

The one thing I will mention is if you have a mystery snail that looks like it might be dead—one of the things that I do is if a mystery snail is in the tank for longer than a day in the same position, I may take it out and just make sure that it's not rotting.

A dead mystery snail is usually going to smell pretty bad, so if you remove it from the tank real quick and it's not smelling, put it back. But it could be in bad shape, so you're going to want to keep an eye on that.

If your snail really isn't moving around, something may be wrong—maybe it's not getting the food that it needs. They generally will live around a year, so if it's at the point where it's about a year old, it may be reaching just the end of its life.

Common Challenges

If there are any challenges to keeping snails, it really is centered around water parameters—making sure all your nitrogen parameters are in check, your pH is high enough to keep them, and your water hardness is correct.

If they start to have any flaking to their shells, where you have like white patches or their shells look thin or maybe pitted, that's probably due to not enough calcium. Maybe the pH has gone too low, or you don't have enough calcium in your water. So you might want to deal with that via your dietary needs.

But they're really cool little organisms—a lot of great color, super peaceful, and they look pretty nice in a planted tank.