Feeding Aquatic Snails to Terrestrial Species

[manderkeeper]

I am thinking of raising some aquatic snails and tong feeding them to fire salamanders. Has anyone tried this before? In USA it is not legal to ship live land snails between states without a permit, so I think it would be too much trouble to get started with land snails and I am not sure how fast the ones I can collect in my yard would breed. I've heard aquatic snails breed quite fast but some concern about their shells causing impaction thus I had the idea to just remove them from their shells and add a little calcium powder as a replacement. My sals are very picky about what they want to eat, so I am trying to find ways to introduce more variety.

 

[Chinadog]

When they were juveniles, a group of Cynops pyrrhogaster I was raising went through a phase of aquatic snail eating. They would spend all day hunting them and would swallow them whole, shell and all. They were baby bladder and greater pond snails up to almost the size of their heads!
It was a phase in the end though, none of them bother with snails any more. I put it down to their diet lacking something the snails contained, but that's only a guess, I will be interested to see if this years juveniles do the same as their diet is pretty much the same.

 

[michael]

The risk is probably small but snails can be disease carriers.

 

[manderkeeper]

I've thought about that too, I just got everyone deparasited last month so I am not too anxious to go through syringe feeding medications again. I think if I try the snails I will send a sample of the first generation snails into my vet and see if they can screen for known parasites like they did with the stool samples. Bacteria and such, I don't know how it could be screened for.