Maybe someone will have a good solid answer for you. Here is our
experience.

We run apple snails some in our pond. The winter kills them, so we have to
overwinter some in an aquarium to avoid buying the next year. Last year Jim
put an eggcase above his 40 gal aquarium in his office. They
hatched...about 300 baby snails the size of a pinhead. That is the aquarium
that holds our tropicals for overwintering. The 300 did very well. Grew!
When they reached 1/2 inch, however, the mass of waste began to become a
significant issue and led to real imbalance in the tank. Jim began feeding
them to his Oscar.

We put about 40 in the pond this year. We are now getting 10-15 eggcases
per week in the pond. The math on that is very scary (300x 12 = 3600 baby
snails per WEEK). We are hoping that the koi and goldfish are eating like
crazy. We are not seeing the number of babies that we would if they were
all growing up. We are glad that winter will reduce the number in the pond.

We don't know how many is too many, but the possibility is there of a very
large amount of waste and of them eating plants, etc. Test your water
regularly. If you want to cut them back, begin destroying the egg cases as
they are laid. That will help for the next cycle. They appear to begin
dying significantly in the second season.

Good luck.

--
______________________________________________
See our pond at: http://www.home.bellsouth.net/p/pwp-jameshurley
Check out Jog-A-Thon fundraiser (clears $140+ per jogger) at:
www.jogathon.net
______________________________________________
"Sean R. Kerns" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I've got a ~700Gal. backyard pond. A few years ago, I introduced 20
Japanese
snails, bought from one of the catalog pond suppliers. Last year, when
cleaning out the pond, I counted 76 medium or adult sized snails, and a
veritable cornucopia of little ones. Last weekend,w e did another
cleaning,
and I didn't count, but there we a lot more.
So, my question: do I have too many of them now? How many is too many?
I've
been working on the theory that if there weren't enough food for them (I
do
have several large goldfish in there), they wouldn't keep multiplying, but
maybe that's not the case?

Thanks in advance,

Sean
Cincinnati, OH