About ramshorn snails with pygmy sunfish

Are adult ramshorns large enough NOT to get eaten by pygmy sunfish? I am thinking of getting a breeding population of ramshorns in the planned pygmy sunfish tank in order for the sunfish to have some snail caviar in their diet, but would I also need to worry about the adults?

They don't eat the adults, just the little ones. I'm not sure at what size they eat them (in the egg sack? when first hatched?) but I do know that the Elassoma gilberti tanks I kept had a lower reproduction rate than tanks without the pygmy sunfish. The first freshwater tank I set up after keeping only Elassoma for a year shocked me with the rate of snail reproduction. It's a neolamprologus multifasciatus shell dwelling cichlid tank, where I guess the cichlids are somewhat symbiotic with snails and instinctively know not to eat them. So the snail population just exploded, it was ridiculous. I added some of our native carnivorous palaemonetes shrimp to eat the snails, and that's working well so far. Hmm maybe I'm getting off track. My point is: Will there still be a sustainable snail population in your Elassoma tank? Yes, they will breed and have a sustainable population. Will there be quite a lot of them? No, it's not the snail-splosion you see in other setups.

Edited by EricaLyons, 01 July 2013 - 03:18 PM.

By the way, I think I've just about finalized my setup! The pygmy sunfish will be kept both in a 5 gallon tank near my bed (the one the paradise fish, Chance, is currently in - he will soon be moved to the much more spacious quarters of a divided 30 gallon tank, with another paradise fish on the other side) and in a roughly 7 gallon sterilite bin that may or may not serve as a breeding tank. Both will be populated with ramshorns (possibly blue ones for cosmetic reasons) long before I get the sunfish.

Edited by Joshaeus, 01 July 2013 - 07:04 PM.

Erica is right. They eat both developing eggs and small snails, but if you have a good amount of algae in the tank there should be plenty of survivors. When I took apart my Elassoma tank after about a year, there were six adult snails that I had originally added, probably 300 very small ones, in the range of 0.5 mm or less, and maybe only a dozen of intermediate size that had managed to survive that stage.

I admit that this is a really late response, but would pygmy sunfish eat baby malaysian trumpet snails? Or are mts's too developed at birth for the sunnies to predate?

I think Melanoides snails are probably too hard for Elassoma to eat, even newborns.