I am the founder of Shrimp Aquatics and a freshwater aquarist with 4 years of hands-on experience keeping and breeding ornamental shrimp, fish, and invertebrates. Based in Ho Chi Minh City, one of the world's leading hubs for aquatic livestock, I test every care guide in my own fish room before publishing.
Care-guide methodology: husbandry advice is checked against observations from our own tanks where applicable, while species and water-parameter claims are reviewed against cited sources. Read our Content Policy.
Plan on several years. Care sites and keepers mostly put a rabbit snail’s lifespan at about 1 to 5 years, and the highest figure in circulation is ten. No study has measured it, so every one of those numbers is…
A rabbit snail that hasn’t moved since yesterday is usually alive. These animals are slow, and they shut the trapdoor whenever they want to be left alone. A new one can stay closed for a day or two after a…
Rabbit snails eat the film. A Tylomelania rabbit snail spends most of its day rasping biofilm, aufwuchs and algae off rock, wood and glass, and that layer, not the food you drop in, is the main meal. What you can…
They’re both big snails, and that’s about where the resemblance ends. A rabbit snail is a live-bearing Sulawesi snail, Tylomelania sp. It drops one already shelled young at a time into the tank, about once a month, and grazes the…
Many rabbit snail species are, but “rabbit snail” isn’t one animal. Most species that have been assessed are listed as threatened, and 19 are Critically Endangered.[[1]] The genus as a whole has no single status, and the snails sold in…
Yes, rabbit snails breed in a home aquarium, and you don’t have to do much to make it happen. Keep a small group in steady, warm, hard water with plenty to graze, and young turn up on their own. What…
A rabbit snail’s name tells you its color, not its species. Yellow, orange poso, chocolate, gold, black spotted: these are labels sellers wrote to describe how a snail looks. For buying, that’s good news. The lines sold in the hobby…
A Sulawesi rabbit snail (Tylomelania sp.) is moderate to keep, but it needs an advanced tank: 79-86°F (26-30°C), pH 7.5-8.5, GH 4-8 dGH, KH 3-6 dKH, TDS 150-250 ppm and nitrate under 10 ppm, in a system mature enough to…
Rabbit snails (Tylomelania) come from one island: Sulawesi, Indonesia.[[1]] The best-known species live in its two ancient lake systems, Lake Poso and the Malili lakes, but the genus also lives in rivers across most of the island. For your tank,…
Lake Matano is the lake most Sulawesi keepers end up reading about. The cardinal shrimp lives there and nowhere else. Its surface water is warm, startlingly clear and very short of dissolved minerals. What almost nobody mentions is that the…
A settled Sulawesi shrimp spends almost all its time doing one thing. It works a thin living film off rock with its front legs, a few square millimeters at a time. It moves slowly, stays in contact with a surface,…
Lake Towuti’s surface water has been measured, and it’s warmer, more alkaline and far more dilute than most keepers picture. Seven surface stations were sampled between June and October 2009. The lake averaged 85.3°F (29.6°C) and reached above 86°F (30°C)…
