Recently I ordered some "orange" ramshorns from a website and put them in the 10 gallon tank I'm prepping (aging) to be a shrimp tank. They are pretty interesting looking; some are a medium sort of orangish-brown, but others are much brighter and vary from a salmon color to more of a pure orange. Most have some variation in their color as well, showing tiny spots or, more often, bands of lighter and darker coloration. (Almost a "dreamsicle" sort of effect.)
Anyway, here's a particularly good close-up of one of the smaller ones. To put the scale in perspective, that substrate is not regular flourite...it is flourite sand.
Hope you enjoy the pic! If they breed, I'm sure I'll be bringing some to a meeting soon for the club auction.
my "orange" ramshorns
my "orange" ramshorns
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Fr. John Paul Walker, O.P.
I bought them from a site called Yellow Shrimp. The owner of that site often has auctions up for these guys on Aquabid. I ordered three different colors; some pinks (which I put in a tank with a betta and they were all eaten in about 24 hours), some blues (which are really tiny but, so far, don't look very blue to memaria wrote: What website did you buy them from?
), and then these oranges which I love. It's also worth noting that these are the same species as the brown ones, so if you put these in the same tank with browns, they'll interbreed and after a few generations all you'll have left are browns since that is the dominant color in their genetics. So part of my routine each day is I check the tank my orange ramshorns are in and remove any small brown ramshorns I find and put them in another tank.
Fr. John Paul Walker, O.P.
Ya I am finding they are surprisingly fun to watch. One of my tanks is currently empty except for the ramshorns (I am aging it to be a Blue Pearl shrimp tank), and they are really fascinating. I love how even a pretty big ramshorn will try to climb to the very edge of a plant leaf or piece of driftwood, and suddenly gravity is just too much and he falls off and sort of "floats" down to the surface of the substrate, unperturbed.maria wrote: I have a bunch of small brown ramshorn snails, you buy plants you get hitchhikers. Not complaining, being a newbie, I wouldn't have thought of adding snails, but I do love watching them in the tanks.
But yes, there are always hitchikers...thus my daily "remove the brown ones" routine. I've recently added a bunch of plants so it's inevitable that snails and eggs come along for the ride. Any pond snails & brown rams get pulled, as well as very tiny rams where I can't tell their color yet. They get put into a 2.5 gal tank I have with some plants until they grow large enough where I can identify their color pattern.
Fr. John Paul Walker, O.P.
