I bought four white cloud minnows for my 5 gallon tank a few weeks ago, I just looked at the tank and noticed something crawling on the tube of the air pump, it looks like some kind of snail! (Although it looks quite squidgy so i'm not sure that it has a shell).

It's about a centimeter long, half a centimeter wide but quite fat and round and has two antennae and a sucker-like mouth.

I haven't noticed it before and as I say I've had the tank for a while, where can it have come from!?

Thanks

It could be a little ramshorn (pest!) snail.. but if it doesnt have a shell, then i've no idea, sounds quite weird..

Thanks for your reply.

It's curled up now looking as if it is inside a shell so I guess it is a snail. The snail you mentioned looks quite similar (from pictures I googled) so you could well be right. In what way is it a pest? Should I get rid of it?

I quite like ramshorn snails. If you have it with goldfish, goldfish will eat small ramshorns, so they never mature (at least in my goldfish tanks).

I just let the little ramshorns do there thing in my tanks

I had ramshorns come in on a new plant I bought this summer for my tropical tank. At first there were a few but now there are tons. I find they don't really do any harm. When I vaccume the tank a lot of them usually get flushed with the old water, and if I think they are really getting out of control I'll feed some of the biggers ones to the goldies, they just gobble them up!

Chrissy