I woke up this morning and looked in my tank and i didnt see my black mystery snail anywhere! She got into the back of the filter once a few months ago so i know it's possible for her to escape. I was late for work so i didnt have enough time to find her! Ack! How long can they live outside of water!!!!

-Thanks

thanks a ton, she's such an explorer =(

she may be in the tank hiding somewhere, but i was late for work and my water was cloudy this morning after doing a water change and adding some zyme to the water last night.......

bleh, i hope i find her, i've grown so attached to her.. =((

i get to go back home from work for a little bit in 2 hours... i hope she's ok still...

thanks for the quick reply tho

Water quality should be perfect, i've been fully cycled for about 6 months now and last time i checked everything was fine. I do 50% weekly water changes and just did one last night.

she has only crawled out 1 time before and she only climbed up the 'out spout' of one of my filters and was sitting in the back of my filterbox eating all the goodies on my filter media...

i feed fruit and veggies every couple days and leave it in untill it's fully eaten, there's actually 2 pieces of cantelope left in there...but cucumber is her favorite...
also feed her algae disks and there are 3 large plants in my tank that she likes to munch on...

I do not leave 2 inches of air at the top of the tank because i have a penguin biowheel that gets pretty noisy when the water level is not full....

The only thing i can think of is that i changed both of my filter pads last night, and put some stress zyme into the water to help with this...it made my water pretty cloudy and i'm not quite sure why.....

i'm not 100% sure that she has escaped, but i get so paranoid when i dont see her right away and the water was cloudy so i couldnt see that well and i was late for work and didnt have much time to look

the last time i "thought" i lost her, she had kinda burrowed under one of my potted plants in my tank so the plant was sitting on top of her...that one gave me quite a scare =)

Welp, i just got home from work and my snail was sitting on the glass doing her thing =) so i guess i overreacted again.......

I guess my snail is more of a hider then an escape artist =)

thanks anyways for your help and advice, if anything you got me to be less worried so i could get some work done at work =)


-THANKS!

LOL Ive gone through that same thing before! When I first got my snail (pictured above) he was about the size of a nickel. I came home from work and didnt see him in the tank and realized he could have fit throught the opening in the back! I looked all over the place and couldnt find him and was so stressed out! Then I moved a plant in the tank and saw him sleeping peacefully between the leaves on it.

Awhile after that I was cleaning out that tank and had the lid off for a little while. I came back to check and make sure my fish hadnt jumped out (not thinking I needed to worry about the snail!) and there Snail was, out of the water, perched at the top of the tank about to climb down! I never knew how fast snails were till I got an apple snail.

I actually read a story about someone whose snail got out of the tank and was missing for about a month. The person figured it had died and kind of forgot about it. Then they moved and under the tank stand was the snail, all sealed up in its shell, still alive. So as long as they can stay closed they will retain moisture.

I am not recommending keeping your snail out of water, though!