when I was in college we did some research into using snails as a source of fertilizer, I have always wondered if snails might actually be retromental to our fight against algae.. When we were doing research we found wout that as snails ate algae in a surface they left behind small cells of algae alive, those cells would eventually grow bigger and more dense... when we took alagal food source out of the water colmn, algae seemed to come back, what was the cause and where did it get its food from? we started looking into mucus left behind by the snails as they move, we collected large quantities, and Bingo, we found the algae's food source. turns out that snails are not that dumb, as they cosume algae they sort of "farm" new algae mats, to come back to...I gratuated that semester and never went back to school or had second toughts about it... I have been thinking of testing how this translates to reefkeeping, I wanna do two small tanks, both the same livestock, sand and water source, one with snails, and one without snails, and see which one grows more algae in the long term....
