Chris Tulino

I bought two clown loaches at Petsmart about 2 months ago in hopes that my exploding snail population would decline. I must say, to this day I have never seen one of the loaches eat a snail with my own eyes. I know they are however, because the snail population has taken a huge hit since I bought the loaches. The other day I saw one of the loaches grab a snail, and like a dog, took it somewhere to the back of the aquarium to (assumably) eat it away from the other fish. I never actually got to see him eat it because I had to go to work, but its the closest Ive come lol.
The fact that they are beautiful fish is a nice touch too.

I bought two clown loaches thinking that they would eat the snails that I have in my tank. They hide a lot at night and sleep in hiding. During the day, they are out swimming or either stay at the bottom. While they are sleeping at night, snails go nuts and start crowing on the glass tank. I probably have 50 snails or so in different sizes. When I wake up in the morning, all the snails are thrown at the bottom. Clown loaches clean up the tank every day by swimming near the snails and knock them down at the bottom of the tank. This is amazing. They love to keep the tank neat. However, I don't know if they are necessarily eating any snails. If anyone who knows or has seen for sure that clown loaches do eat snails, do you feed fish food also? Or you don't feed any food, so loaches get hungry and start eating snails.

I can say that while cleaning my tank, I have found dozens of empty snail shells and my snail population is under a half-dozen visible snails at any given time (down from over thirty). One factor could be that my loaches (I now have 2) are mostly active at night. Also, I have found that the amount of feeding (flake or shrimp pellets) that I do can dramtically change the behaviour of my fish. Sometimes, it's good to leth them skip a day of feeding and maybe feed them light the next day. They will start looking around for other sources of food. Even though snails are slow, they must be harder to eat than flake.

I bought a snail for my 20 gallon about 6 months ago. He grew incredibly fast...and needless to say I now have about 15 other little snails galavanting around the aquarium neighborhood. I want to get rid of all of the baby snails and am considering doing this by purchasing a Clown Loach...however I don't want to lose the big one as he does a great job in "tidying up" the aquarium. Would the loach have any interest in eating my large one? Any advice will help! Thank you!

Clowns are alrite, I can't say I am too impressed with them, but if u don't have any 'small' fish in your aquarium you should look into puffer fish. I have a snail prob too but within an hour of throwing the puffer in I saw him rip into a snail. The store owner also said that he'll skip a feed or two for the puffer and within a 2 to 4 days a tank will be completly void of snails. Just a tid bit i learned.