I found a batch of water snail eggs attached to some water weed while I was collecting duckweed for my fish at one of the ponds in the Central park of NY.
I brought it home along with sample of water and the water weed for further observation.
Place it all in a small plexiglass box.
I want to take a video of the water snail egg's development. The first surprise comes when I tried to place the eggs in front of the camera. I found a second batch of eggs!
The eggs have to stay under water!
To fully simulate the natural environment I added the duckweed and the adult snail that I found in the duckweed.
Here is a side view of my whole set-up. I decided to focus a camera on the first batch of the water snail eggs.
Recording development of water snail eggs at the normal speed (30 frames a second) does not reveal much - snails don't move very fast to begin with and eggs development takes days and weeks.
Recording development in the timelapse mode is more interesting! I took pictures for timelapse video with different intervals (1 picture was taken every second/ every 5 seconds/every 10 second/ every 3o seconds) over the course of a week. Here you can see the movements of the eggs inside of the jello bag.
Here you can see one little baby snail gets out!
Here you can see the adult snail lays a new batch of eggs!
Here you can see the baby snail moves around.
After observing snails for a week, I released them in my fish tank.
Have fun and happy water snails :)
Hi, I'm in the UK - I bought a couple of floating plants which I washed and found what I thought was slug - but then realised was mini-spawn - so I rang the sales place and said 'snails' - which I've had in the past in my small pond 3 years ago. I appreciate your tenacity in recording their progress! My blob is now in the pond.
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