The Black Japanese Trapdoor Snail will grow to about 1.5 inches and do well. But in the Winter it will need the pond to not freeze solid and requires a hole in the pond for gasses to escape just like fish do. Regards, Lisa

You can get pond vacs to clean the bottom, you can also check around and see if there are any companies that perform pond maintenace that could come and do it for you, although the one company I have seen ads from out here end up draining the pond and using a pressure washer. Pond vacs will not work too well with heavy gravel although it might work if you are using a thin layer of fine gravel. A shop vac also works for cleaning and there have been many posts from people about making their own pond vac. Flagstones might work better than gravel and would definitely be easier to remove for cleaning as long as you keep them to manageable sizes. You can try stirring up the gravel to suck the debris out but as a regular maintenance job it might do more harm than good as you would be disturbing the bacteria good and bad that would be in the gravel. Snails will eat stuff that falls to the bottom but they will also add to the bio load. Thats my 2 pennies, I am sure that you will get lots of other posts with helpful suggestions here. Good luck

vieja, depends on what kind of frog tadpoles they are, as they all change at different rates. Leopard frog tadpoles can change into frogs a few weeks. Others such as Green frogs or Bullfrogs can take two years or more to change over. It all depends on the pond conditions, temperature and food availability. Since you describe them being "the size of a big marble", it makes me think you may have either Green frog or Bullfrog tadpoles. I have thought in the passed, that the Green frog tadpoles, I put into in my ponds had either died or had been eaten,since there was never a sign of them, only to find the next year some young frogs in and around my ponds. They are very good at surviving and staying out of harms way. "Horton"

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.