Breeding
Breeding your snails is relatively simple and requires no more human intervention than the basic care and setting up of your snail’s home, providing your snails are well kept and living conditions are good, then the likelihood of them breeding is good.
However serious consideration should be given to hatching eggs, especially if your snail is one of the more common snails such as Achatina Fulica, it is very easy to become overrun with hundreds of baby snails if you are not careful, and as these are so commonly available you will have some difficulty in re-homing them all.
To successfully breed your snails you will need at least two snails of the same species of snail, although sometimes it is better to have more than two to encourage breeding, your snails living conditions should be good, with a deep substrate to encourage egg laying.
Your snails will mate by entwining around each other in a gently sliding over each other, this will cause the snails sexual organs to become enlarged (snails have both male and female sexual organs) until one penetrates the other with a centimetre long spear, thus passing on the sperm to fertilise the eggs.
After one mating the snail can store sperm for a prolong period of time, fertilising eggs as and when they choose, releasing approximately 200 fertilized eggs at a time, each snail can lay approximately 1200 eggs a year.
When ready (approximately 1-2 weeks after mating) the snail will burrow deep into the substrate, clearing out a small cavity, into which it will lay its eggs, these are small white round eggs depending on what species of snail, different species lay slightly different coloured and sized eggs. Once the snail has finished laying the eggs it will move out of the hole covering the eggs as it goes and leave them alone, providing the temperature and humidity are kept up, these eggs will hatch within one to two weeks, the tiny baby hatchlings will then slowly move to the surface of the substrate to start eating, having probably fed already on their egg shells.
It can be amazing to see how well timed this event can be, I have witnessed nearly 100 babies emerging through the soil all within a few moments of each other.
To aid the hatching of your eggs, they can be removed from the soil (very carefully, they are not as strong as chicken eggs) and placed in a small plastic container with some sphagnum moss in and covered over, they should be kept moist and warm to help them hatch. Once hatched, they can be returned to a larger tank, some owners prefer to keep young snails separate from the adult population.
I use a smaller plastic tank as a nursery for my young snails.
Care of your baby snails is the same as your adult ones, they will eat the same foods, cuttlefish bone and calcium are especially important to the babies to help grow their shells, as is the way you handle them, their shells at this stage are very soft and easy to break, take extreme care when moving them.
If you do not wish to hatch your snail’s eggs, it is easy to control the population.
Regular checks of the soil will soon show any clutches of eggs that have been laid, these can be removed from the tank and placed into plastic bags and frozen, I normally leave them for about 24-48 hours before disposing of them, this may seem cruel, but so far this has been the most widely accepted method of population control, It is unwise to just dump eggs into the rubbish or onto compost heaps, as these can still be quite warm areas and the eggs may still hatch, thus releasing the snails into the wild where they will most likely slowly perish.