[steyer12]

I have two goldfish and two mystery snails. Fish get fish food and snails (and a couple shrimp) share an algea wafer. The only problem is that the goldies love to play with the algea wafer. They're either eating it or playing with it until its all disintegrated. Ontop of that all the goldfish do when they're not being fed is scavenge the gravel for food so I'm not sure how much excess food is even left on the bottom for the snails and shrimp to scavenge. Should I just leave it alone and trust that the snails are taking care of themselves or are goldfish just not good at leaving scraps for scavengers?

 

[Sweet Tee]

I don't place food into my tank to feed my snail per say...it's a planted tank, has a bit of algae, and my snail is constantly foraging around for food. He's getting bigger, so he must be eating! The snail I have is a ramshorn, so I don't know if some snails need to be "fed" while others just forage...

 

[steyer12]

I do have a planted tank so I guess they'd start eating those before giving up on life. They've just been very lethargic the last day or two, though. I realize how silly it is to call a snail abnormally lethargic but its true. They're usually very active and go swinging from my plants like monkeys (very slow, slimey monkeys) and kept uprooting them.

Kinda on a similar topic I've been losing ghost shrimp every week. The fish and shrimp get along fine during the week (its an office tank) when they're getting fed every day but over the weekends they don't get fed and I always come in Monday morning to find shrimp parts stuck in the filter or one of my goldies playing with a shrimp tail. The goldfish are easily twice the size they were two weeks ago.

 

[Sweet Tee]

I've heard on other forums that if a fish's mouth is large enough to be able to eat a shrimp...watch out

Just a bit of what I've read other places! I'm not familiar with goldfish diet to know what they eat though.

 

[James0816]

Well......your goldies are getting free meals with the shrimpies. Goldies are constantly eating...non stop...anything that they can find. This includes any feed, shrimp and small fish. Unfortunately, they don't make for good community type fish. They should be kept in their own tank with their own kind.

Learned this the hard way myself...thus our goldie got the nickname of "killer".