Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Creating the food chain Snails / Mussels

After draining down my pond, I walked over some of the exposed shoreline today. There were oodles and gobs of snail and small mussel shells. That should be good food for the redears; but also bad as part of the cycle for the grubs that infest fish through birds / snails / fish, right? Any thing I should do as a result of finding all these?

Consider adding some more RES (when you refill). A healthy population of them will cut way down on snails. Mussels, I don't know - how big are they?.

Most looked to be about 1/2 inch. Largest looked to be slightly over an inch.

I'm expecting to sooner or later end up with mussels in my pond. I'm only 1/2 mi. from a river that has them so I'm also curious as to what to do when they come.
If it were here I would say the 1/2" to 3/4" mussles were just babies. I see them in the river 4" to 6"!

Ranger, maybe you could start a pearl farm?
Japanese prefer fresh water mussels for cultured pearls.
Here's a link to Illinois mussels: http://www.jaxshells.org/dhess.htm

I remember reading somewhere that BG will also eat small snails. I'd really rather not have them but have no idea how you can prevent them.

Yes, we've seen BG suck snails out of their shells in an aquarium.

Bill Cody told me it may depend on the snails. I have two species in my ponds. Bill says one the fish like because it is easy to crush. The other is not.

They can eat zebra mussels.

Centrarchids
1l centrarchids have upper
and lower pharyngeal
teeth (Figure lb),
but molariform teeth
are present only in redear sunfish
(Lepomis microlophus) and pumpkinseed
(L. gibbosus) (Trautman
1957). Mollusk-eating in centrarchids
is usually associated with
increases in (1) proportion of molariform
teeth on the pharyngeal
jaws, (2) width of lower pharyngeal
pads, and (3) thickness of
several pharyngeal muscles
(Lauder 1983). Predation on thinshelled
gastropods by these sunfishes
is well documented (Carothers
and Allison 1968; Laughlinrr
and Werner 1980). The redear
sunfish is capable of eating bivalves
up to 5 mm long (Britton
and Murphy 1977). In experimental
tanks, adult redear sunfish 18
to 26 cm long fed on zebra mussels
up to 20 mm long, and a 7-
mm-long juvenile ate young mussels
under 3 mm long U. French
and M. Morgan, U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service, unpublished
data). Zebra mussels were found
to be common in the diet of
pumpkinseed in the Crapina-Jijila
Pond flood area of the Danube
River delta in Romania (Spataru
1967).