Cleaning my rabbit snail aquariums takes some special consideration. While mystery snails and ramshorns will happily mob food at one end of the aquarium while I carefully clean, this isn’t always true of rabbit snails. Rabbit snails eat until they are very full, and then can sleep for a few days. When resting, they often burrow under the aquarium gravel and hide behind the sponge filters. Females also do this right before giving birth to a baby.

To keep them as safe as possible from injury, I very carefully rake the gravel with my fingers and remove every single rabbit snail I can find and place them gently in a bucket. Then I can safely gravel vacuum their aquarium and put them back as soon as the debris settles again.

I also squeeze the sponge filters in a separate bucket to break up the bio-film and make sure they aren’t clogged and that water is still flowing through them well and replace filter media as needed.