I use Mystery (Apple) snails and Trapdoor snails. They eat the algae but not the live plants, at least not much and are pretty. The Mystery snails can be yellow, white, blue or gray and the Trapdoors are black. They are both fairly large varieties but are not cold hardy. I don't bring them in and have to replace them every year. They also lay their eggs out of the water so you can scrape them away if you don't want loads of snails. The fish also jump out of the pond to eat them. They lay their eggs just above the surface of the water.

I have some in mind but I don't think they are the good kind, lol.

SJN,

I also have the Trapdoor Snails. They have not bothered my water plants or fish. As Karyn stated they do eat algae and grow to the size of a golfball.

I can't imagine what snails you had that would actually eat fish....interesting.

~Tj~

Thanks I knew some of you would know about snails lol. I will check into those two kinds of snails. The Trapdoors sound interesting... That's funny that the fish jump out of the water to eat thier eggs :D
I saw some snails that were called Ramshorn or something like that. They had a pretty shell but I don't know if they would eat the plants either.

I have no clue what kind we had -they didn't get golf ball size, maybe small marble size. They would get ahold of the little baby fish (fry's?) tail and then just slowly eat them. The fish weren't dead either, because we would see them wiggling trying to get away. There was plenty of algae but they were just evil I guess lol.