Orange Poso Rabbit Snail

Species: Tylomelania sp. "Poso Orange", not yet formally described.

Water: 26–30 °C, pH 7.5–8.5.

Eats: biofilm, algae, detritus and offered foods.

Breeding: gives birth to one large live young at a time.

The Orange Poso is the best-known Sulawesi snail in the hobby: a bright orange body and long wrinkled snout under a long, dark, ridged shell. Rabbit snails (Tylomelania) live only on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, in Lake Poso and the Malili lakes, in warm alkaline water over sand, mud and rock. This is the Lake Poso orange form. Retailers often list it as Tylomelania gemmifera, but that is a described species from the Malili lakes; the Poso orange form is recorded in hobby surveys as Tylomelania sp. "Poso Orange" and has not been formally described. What you are buying is the animal, not the label.

It is a grazer of biofilm (the thin living film of bacteria and microscopic life on every surface), algae and detritus (fine settled waste), and it takes any food offered. Plants are mostly ignored, though soft leaves may be tested; firm plants come to no harm.

Rabbit snails are livebearers: the female carries a single embryo and releases it as a fully formed baby snail already around a centimetre long, at intervals of weeks. Numbers build slowly and never run away the way pond snails do.

Water: warm and alkaline, 26–30 °C with pH 7.5–8.5. Alkaline means a pH above 7, the opposite of acidic. A heater holding the high twenties is not optional; the lakes it comes from sit near 28 °C year round. Published guides describe the lake water as soft to moderately mineralised rather than very hard, so avoid buffering soils that pull the pH down but do not chase very high hardness.

Tank: a mature tank with sand or fine substrate to root about in and rock to graze. Let the tank settle for months before adding it, as for Sulawesi shrimp.

Feeding: algae wafers, sinking pellets, spirulina and blanched vegetables a few times a week, with leftovers removed after a day.