Buy Pond Snails in the UK

Pond snails are usually met as hitchhikers, but bought deliberately they are a genuinely useful clean-up crew — grazing algae, biofilm and decaying leaves, and breeding fast enough to serve as live food for pufferfish and loaches.

They are entirely shrimp-safe and will not damage healthy plants, though they will finish off dying leaves. Population size tracks feeding: overfeed and they multiply, cut back and numbers fall.

Keep GH above 6 to protect shells.