How To Easily Incubate And Hatch Snail Eggs – Complete Guide
Are you looking for how to incubate and hatch snail eggs? If your answer is yes, then you are at the right place as we will be walking you through the complete guide on how to easily incubate and hatch snail eggs.
Hatching of snail eggs is one of the easiest things to do in snail farming but you don’t need to bother yourself if you don’t have the knowledge as we are showing you simple steps on how to carry out the incubation and hatching process of snail eggs.
Also Read Top 40 Agriculture Business Ideas for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
How Do Snail Reproduce – Reproduction Process of Snail
Snails are oviparous animals, meaning they reproduce by laying eggs that hatch into young snails, just like birds.
The mating process is usually like a fight. After mating, each snail will lay its eggs in clutches and bury them in the dirt.
Spawning takes place 10 days after mating, and it simply involves the “pregnant” snail laying her eggs within the earth holes that serve as the natural incubation chamber. The holes are filled with dirt once the eggs are placed.
The eggs of snails are small, pearly, and spherical and are protected by a viscous substance on the egg shells. After about 14-40 days that the eggs are buried in the soil, the eggs would start hatching. Each hatched snail weighs 0.03mg on average.
Like other animals, Snails are very intelligent
They don’t just lay their eggs in the dirt, they lay the eggs in the part of the soil that is suitable enough to incubate the eggs.
How Many Eggs Does a Snail Lay?
A land snail can lay between 10 and 400 eggs in each clutch depending on the snail species. For example:
- Achatina achatina species lays clutches of 30-300 eggs
- Achatina fulica species lay clutches of 10-400 eggs
- Archachatina marginata species lay clutches of 4-18 eggs
How To Easily Hatch Snail Eggs
Before going into this section have in back of your mind that hatching of Snail Eggs is very simple once you follow the steps below:
- Collect the eggs from the snail pen
- Prepare an incubator for hatching the snail eggs.
- Incubate the eggs in the snail egg incubator
- Track the hatching progress of the snail eggs
- Take care of the snail eggs while they are incubating.
- Collect the new snail hatchlings and keep them in a new pen.
Also Read How to Convert Potato Wastes into Bioethanol (Dimerci Lab Reveals)
1. Collect the Eggs From the Snail Pen
When your snails start laying eggs, you need to check the pen every day to pick out the eggs.
To do this, you need a hoe to till the soil gently and pick out the snail eggs.
Don’t ever use your hand to pick up the snail’s eggs.
When you pick up snail eggs with your bare hands, you reduce the chances of the eggs hatching.
Use a plastic spoon instead for picking the snail eggs and use a plastic tray to collect the eggs.
After collecting all the eggs, move to the next step to incubate the snail eggs.
Note this…
Once your snails start laying eggs, you have to come back weekly or bi-weekly to check for new eggs.
2. Prepare an incubator for hatching the snail eggs.
The incubator or hatchery for snail eggs is not a giant electrical device like that of poultry eggs.
It is just a mixture of soil with a little bit of water in a Tupperware tub or in one of your snail pens in a commercial snail farming setup.
The researcher concluded that “Rural snail breeders are assured of high snail egg hatchability with the application of 15% water content (gram water per gram dry soil, weight per weight) during incubation of snail eggs buried in airtight containers to reduce evaporation.”
After getting the correct mixture of soil and water, choose how you want to incubate the snail eggs.
For those who keep snails as a pet, using Tupperware with air holes in the lid is okay.
For commercial snail farming, fill your pen with soil to a depth of 15 – 20cm from the floor.
After that…
Use a hand fork or trowel to loosen the soil.
You can also use your hand to loosen the soil since it’s not really thick.
Loosening the soil before incubating the snail eggs makes it easy for snail hatchlings to emerge from the soil.
If you have followed the process to this point, it means you are done preparing the snail eggs incubator.
Step 3: Incubate the eggs in the snail egg incubator
After preparing the snail eggs incubator, it’s time to introduce the eggs. Using a hand trowel or your hand, open up the soil to about 2 inches deep.
The diameter of the hole should be wide enough to contain your snails.
Next…
Use the plastic spoon to scoop the snail eggs into the hole in the incubation pen. After that, cover the snail eggs loosely with about 2 inches of soil.
At this point, you are done incubating the snail eggs. Yippie!! Next will be how to keep track of the hatching process, so keep reading.
4. Track the hatching progress of the snail eggs
It’s easy to track your Snail Eggs’ hatching progress
Below is what you need to do
After burying the snail eggs in the soil, get a sheet of paper and write out the date and number of eggs in the hole. This will help you know when you started incubation and when you will stop.
The incubation period is between 21 – 35 days. It means that the snail eggs will begin to hatch somewhere around the 21st day after incubation.
Naturally, when snail eggs hatch, they crawl out of the thin layer of soil covering them to the surface soil.
However, not all of them tend to come out of the soil.
So, you need to check after 21 days to get them out.
Using a plastic spoon, gently open the soil and pick out the hatched snails onto a plastic tray. Count and record the number of hatched snails and the number of eggs left.
Make sure the sum of these numbers corresponds to the total number of snail eggs you put there. When you are done picking the hatched snails cover up the remaining eggs for another 14 days.
After 14 days, come back again and pick out the hatched snails.
Any remaining eggs in the snail incubation pen after that day should just be discarded.
Following the steps under this subheading will help you know the number of new snails you have on your snail farm.
This number will help you know how many snails you are expecting to have after the farming period. It will also help you to project the amount of feed you need to get.
Most importantly, it will help you forecast and calculate your revenue accurately.
5. Take care of the snail eggs while they are incubating.
We are almost at the end of this guide, I hope you have learned something so far?
I have mentioned some tips on how to take care of snail eggs earlier in this article.
I will go ahead and repeat them here. Here are the ways
- Don’t pick up the snail eggs with your bare hands
- When digging for snail eggs, do so gently so that you don’t crush the eggs.
- Check the snail pen every week or bi-weekly to pick up new eggs.
- To maintain the moisture content of the soil, especially in the northern area, use a hand sprayer to spray water lightly on the soil.
- Do not waterlog the soil so that the eggs can hatch. When the water becomes too much in the soil, it destroys the hatching process.
- Ensure that the incubator has a consistent humidity and temperature all through the incubation period.
- Remember you only need to buy the eggs 2 inches deep so that the weight of the soil will not kill the young hatchlings.
- Use only a plastic spoon to open the soil and remove all the hatched snails and then cover the remaining ones.
6. Collect the new snail hatchlings and keep them in a new pen.
After you have finished hatching the snail eggs, collect the baby snails into a new pen.
Yet again, don’t pick up the baby snails with your bare hand. You might crush their young and very soft shells.
The best snail farming equipment for picking up baby snails is the plastic spoon. When you transfer the baby snails to a new pen, ensure you provide them with some snail food.
The most essential food for a baby is snails is calcium because it will help in strong shell formation.
The aforementioned steps are all you need to easily incubate and hatch your Snail Eggs.
Video Guideline on How To Incubate and Hatch Snail Eggs
