booboomoomoo
Active Member
Hey all, just quick question. Anyone know where to get live snails from?
yup the garden is the best place, buying them is a waste of money imo, collect and breed your own.
snails arent actually as easy to breed and raise as you'd think, tubs need daily cleaning, within a couple of hours the walls are covered in crap again, the food i got was meant to be high in calcium but till i started adding a tsp of repcal to it they were eating each others shells and i was left with dying blobs of flesh,....gross.
to breed them you'd need a composting type setup cos the daily cleaning would remove the eggs.
easy to say catch them in ur yard, i havent seen a single snail in mine this year, mum has managed to collect the whole of 4 snails,...strange with all this wetness were having a snail drought in my area!
once their 'special food' runs out i'll be freezing the rest, they are such a pain to keep.
Thanks for the advice all as for collecting them from the garden ive been told by the vet not to as they are crawling with parasites will have to try Snails Bon Appetite
Why not try Aquarium snails they are easy to keep and breed. Great food for water dragons I reckon. But other than that I think they would stay alive outside of the water long enough to be eaten.
do you actually have any experience keeping/breeding snails? It seems not so might be best not to give advice on things you clearly know nothing about. There is nothing hard about keeping or breeding garden snails, cleaning is only needed once every 1-2months, the slime is harmless so you dont have to remove it as soon as it it deposited. As for the lack of calcium that is quite unusual, i have never encountered that even on thick shelled species fed on a natural diet, ditch the premade food its obviously rubbish, food such as lettuce, cabbage, mushroom, cucumber, zucchini, pumpkin, squash and carrot are eagerly eaten by most snails and i give a piece of cuttle-bone to provide calcium which they chew on and only needs replacing every month or so. You can remove eggs to incubate but its far easier to leave them in the substrate to hatch naturally.
---------- Post added 06-Jan-11 at 08:52 AM ----------
parasites of gastropods will pose no threat to reptiles, parasites tend be be host specific so wild caught snails are of no threat to your pets unless they have been poisoned which is the purpose of the 2 week quarantine
do you actually have any experience keeping/breeding snails? It seems not so might be best not to give advice on things you clearly know nothing about
should have specified, no matter where you collect the snails from you keep them for a minimun of 2 weeks before offering them to your herps. If they are baited they will die before the 2 weeks is over, if they live they are safe to feed. You can also buy tinned snails fro asian grocery stores, not sure what they are worth but might be worth looking into. If you are going through a few snails its probably an idea to breed them, its very easy to do, might do a care sheet on it and see if i can get it added to the wikki
Snails prefer temperatures under about 30c and so do not do well in Northern Australia.If you do a caresheet can you PM me a copy or post in this thread? I'm pretty keen to breed snails as we have none in the gardens around where I live.
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