Would you agree with this statement:

If you want to know if you are overfeeding, get yourself some trumpet snails. If their population gets out of hand, then you are over feeding. You can bring their colony back to a reasonable size by managing the amount of food you are feeding. They will be a good indicator of your feeding habits - maintaining a small colony means that the fish are getting enough, but not too much. Aside from that, trumpet snails are an asset to every tank.

Personally, I love them. But they're divisive little bastards

LemonJelly wrote:

Personally, I love them. But they're divisive little bastards

What u mean Divisive?

Some people love them. Others hate them with a passion

LemonJelly wrote:

Some people love them. Others hate them with a passion

I guess there is a reason for that so

I think it's partly the whole population explosion thing and also the fact that once you have them they're pretty bloody hard to get rid of

Let me tell you my story.

Sometime ago I bought a moss ball, inside 2 uninvited guests, a MTS and a pond snail. Within a week I started seeing tiny pond snails crawling up the glass, very excited at first as it was a new aquarium with no fish at all. So I say ok, my first ever living creature in my first ever aquarium.

Two weeks later I noticed over 20 of them, right about then I started adding fish to the tank, 1 month later I had over 100 of them, thats on a 54 l tank, so I decided to buy 3 chipmunk loaches hoping they will help me control the snail population (and also because I loved them), they would occasionally eat 2 or 3 but never the MTS, at the same time, an interesting thing happened then, the snails stopped coming out during the day (they were actually out 24/7) and started showing at night, while the loaches were sleeping...

Around this time I decided to upgrade my aquarium, so I bought 3 clown loaches (of around 4 cm each) as I knew that within a week I would have my new bigger aquarium. the clown loaches loved them, they eat lots, so I was happy enough as I thought I had found a way to control the snails. One night I had a nitrite spike, and I decided to do an emergency 50% water change, it was dark so I turned the living room lights on, looked under my echinodorus and found over 400 of them... and they were pretty big too! I ended up removing them all.

During this period the MTS NEVER laid a single egg!!!

I was told that the reason why they were reproducing was because I overfeed so I put a few pond snails in a new nano, with no food, algae, etc, in less than a week there were 100 of them. Still only one very big now MTS.

I still have snails in the nano, some nerite a few pond snails and funny enough, amd its NOW the MTS is laying eggs, I rarely feed them (maybe once a week) and there is very little algae in the aquarium if any. My assassin snails got rid of some of the pond snails but the best way to remove them was still by hand. I had to give the assassin snails back to my LFS as they couldnt catch the pond snails and they couldnt control the population either... (I had already moved my nerite and my MTS to a quarantine tank to prevent the assassins from eating them).

So in my opinion, a infestation explosion doesnt necessarily mean you overfeed. In fact, I think the reason why my MTS is now laying eggs is because my pH is around 8 now, where it was 6.5 on the other tank... On the other side my pond snails are barely reproducing... shame cause I wanted to feed them to my clown loaches..

Personally I like mts but I wouldn't like to see someone get them and grow to dislike them! You certainly don't need them to know if you're overfeeding!! There are other tell tale signs. No harm in missing the odd feed either and its good for the fish too I believe but I wouldn't take advice like you were given!