of Snails and Cherries

Snails
Some of you have mentioned seeing SNAILS in the RH Fish Tank. Is it normal? Did someone throw them in? Here i answer your queries...

Snails are everpresent in an aquatic environment when there exist plants. When i buy the plants from the fish shop, there might be snails still crawling on the plants. Even if there aren't any snails on the plants, there might be snails EGGS (transparent, and able to survive dryness for hours) stuck to the leaves. The only way to remove the snails/eggs is to dip the whole plant into BLEACH or CHLORINE for a few minutes in order to destroy them, but this will also kill 20% of the plant, or 100% if i'm not careful in implementing the treatment. Thus i decided on the milder and safer technique of dipping the plants into SALT solution before planting them into the RH Fish Tank. Alas this didn't work as the snails survived.

But rest assured, a handful of snails is normal, and will eat up algae. Too many and they become pests, then i'll have to look for ways to remove them:

1. Puffer Fish: they eat snails very effectively, but once the snails are gone, they bite fish/shrimp fins, then eventually die because fish/shrimp fins aren't filling enough.
2. Loaches: they eat snails effectively, but they also dig the gravel, unearthing plants in the process; terribly damaging to a planted aquarium.
3. Anti-Snail lotions: they kill snails, but they are also harmful to fish/shrimps because it is a sort of poison; definitely no-no in RH Fish Tank.
4. Manually hand-removing snails: effective in that they are physically removed, but snails reproduce tremendously fast; tiring in the long run.
5. Coolie Loach: not well-documented but known to eat snails, yet peaceful towards fish/shrimp and not known to dig. This is the option i will be trying in a few weeks when the snail problem gets worse.

Cherries
The Cherry Shrimps are in the RH Fish Tank! There are 20 of them, reddish in colour, and they look like this...


(pictures are of Cherry Shrimps in my personal fish tank)