Like any living thing, snails also need calcium and other minerals. They are simply essential for maintaining health and growth. But in ordinary food, these substances are not enough, which is why special dressings were invented. The most accessible of them is considered to be sepia.
What it is?
Sepia - bone shell of cuttlefish. It is an oval rudimentary shell that is located along the body of the mollusk, occupying most of it, and serves to maintain its buoyancy and maneuverability in water.
Sepia is difficult to extract because it has a loose porous structure and is fairly easy to damage. If we talk about how it looks, then the color of the shell is always light, it can vary from snow-white to dirty gray. Sometimes brown unpleasant spots may appear on sepia, but this is normal. In this case it just needs to be crushed into small crumbs.
Try to avoid all kinds of sepia substitutes or the finished powders that make up it. Most likely, such a product will contain a huge amount of harmful chemical additives. Also, do not buy colored or sepia with pleasant smells, as dyes and flavors can cause toxicosis in the cochlea, leading to poisoning.
Molecular analysis shows that in sepia, substances such as sodium, iron, calcium, magnesium, zinc and sulfur are present in abundance, and the complete absence of heavy metals makes it completely safe for both the cochlea and humans.
What is the product useful for?
Although sepia is not the cheapest product, breeders still call sepia the best food for snails. And it’s not just that.Consider what it is better than other mineral foods.
With regular feeding of snails with sepia, it brings them great benefit. The squid shell saturates the body of the snail with useful substances that are easily absorbed without causing indigestion or other side effects. The snail becomes more active, and its size begins to increase. Sepia also has another beneficial effect:
- improves the condition of the shell, strengthens it, promotes the healing of cracks, adds shine, removes lamination;
- normalizes digestive processes;
- completely removes an unpleasant odor;
- saturates the color of a snail;
- improves immunity and helps to cope with various diseases.
How to cook?
This product is quite easy to handle.
First, after you open the package and remove the shells from it, you need to soak them in cold water (this is important) for about 2-3 hours, putting the container with water in place without sunlight. After the soaking time has passed, you just need to dry it by putting sepia on paper towels. Then it can be broken into several pieces of medium size or grinded into small crumbs and added portionwise to grain mixtures and even to water.
Sepia snails should be fed regularly for the desired effect as they are eaten. But you do not need to go too far with this. Complications may occur due to an overdose of sepia in the cochlea. And to further enhance the effect of eating cuttlefish shell, you can give milk during bait.
It should be noted that it is necessary to desalinate sepia because it contains a large amount of salt, which, as we all know, seriously harms the body of snails. There are several ways to desalinate cuttlefish shell.
- First you need to make a small through hole in the cuttlefish bone. Then we thread the thread there, and tie it onto a tap with clean filtered running water for 3 hours. Plain tap water will not work, because it contains heavy metals and chlorides.
- We take sepia and rub it with vinegar. Next, using a spoon in small portions, carefully rub the soda into the bone (on the soft side). After we place the bone in well boiled water. The bone should lie in the water for about 2-2.5 hours, and the liquid itself must be changed every 15-20 minutes.
- You can also boil sepia. To do this, you just need to place the bone in the pan, having previously wrapped it in several sheets of salad. Then pour sepia into about 500 ml of water. Boil the cuttlefish bone for about 1 hour, change the water regularly after 20 minutes.
- Sepia can be desalinated with activated carbon. To do this, take 5-10 tablets of activated carbon and crush it into a fine powder. Pour the black powder onto a slightly wet field and wrap sepia in it for 2-3 hours. At the end of the process, it remains only to rinse the bone to remove the remaining coal.
- To desalinate cuttlefish bones, you can use the method of dismembering it into small components and soaking them in cold water. This method, although quite effective, but takes several days.
How to extract from squid?
Sometimes in a store it is difficult to trust inscriptions about 100% naturalness of the product, and then we have only one way out - to get sepia by ourselves.
Cutting squid or cuttlefish is a simple process, but if you don’t know it, it can cause some difficulties.
First you need to rinse squid or cuttlefish under water. When buying, pay attention to the integrity of the carcass - if it is damaged, then there is a high probability that the bone plate is broken. Then, after washing with hands, separate the head from the body itself, where sepia is enclosed. After a sharp knife, make long longitudinal cuts on the sides of the carcass. Next, you just need to bend the resulting parts, and get the bone plate in the middle. After that, it only needs to be washed and desalinated.
See below for a video review of sepia for snails.
