They say that death is a part of the hobby. Though snails are honestly pretty hard to form a deep emotional attachment to, I really loved this nerite. Though unnamed, my snail was a lively critter, an honest guy, and an instrumental component of the aquarium environment. It always sucks to lose something in your care, and that depressing fact of the hobby is no different for a lowly mollusk.
I haven’t taken the opportunity to speak much about my five gallon tank on this blog. I took a trip in August, but before I left I quickly seeded a little aquarium with some clippings of vallisnera, hornwort, fine sand, and a nice rock. I filled it with some water that had collected in a plastic bin outside and left the tank on the windowsill by itself for a week and a half. The sunlight did its work. Clouds of algae cobwebbed the hornwort and an emerald film of duckweed covered every centimeter of the tank’s surface. The sand was a much more forgiving medium than the gravel had been and the vals sent forth a bounty of runners to propagate fresh growths. Even a pleasant fuzz of algae grew along the slanted face of the rock like moss over a boulder. It was a lush system vibrant with life, teeming with tiny pond snails and swirling daphnia. Mosquito larvae from the stagnant bucket water dove and danced in the primordial water column.
The algae on the glass was an eyesore, though, and I knew I needed a nerite to clean the place up. I discovered shortly upon returning from my adventure across the country that there was local fish shop not a fifteen minute walk from my house. The staff are incredibly friendly and knowledgeable, and their selection of freshwater plants and small fish are ideal for my interest in small, filterless aquariums. I was so impressed by the place that I returned the very next day after my first visit and immediately bought a gourami and amano shrimp for the ten gallon (detailed here). On my first trip, however, I bought a nerite.
It was large–a zebra nerite I believe. The shell featured a black strip spiral that bent toward a cracked tip. It was much larger than the nerite I bought months ago for the nerite, and I suppose I should have suspected that it was just an older snail. If a creature gliding along a single slimy foot could be described as lumbering, this snail lumbered. It may have been slow, but the job was done, and it was done well. In a week the glass was free of algae. I like to think that I gave this shy grazer a pleasant last few weeks before it passed.
RIP unnamed nerite, you were a good snail.
