I'm trying to think about how to apply Permaculture principles to an aquarium... its a closed system with basically food and light and water as the inputs. This is also a small aquarium so its much more difficult to manage as it will easily "tip" one direction or the other.
Snails can help eat algae and obviously they are thriving b/c there is a need for their services!
So:
a) get an algae eating fish. There are several types, I think we found (its been a while...) that a Siamensis Algae eater was right as they are active, don't get big and will also eat other foods if algae runs low.
b) add some copper. That'll do in the snails. There are fancy medicines ... or find a piece of copper pipe and toss it in there and see what happens. I once made the mistake of getting fancy, replacing the vinyl tubing with soldered copper ... killed my shrimp in a day. No snails though...
c) as soon as the snails start disappearing, start changing that water! there's a lot more bio material there than the aquarium needs.
d) its hard, but control the feeding. Fish need surprisingly little food.
e) live plants? live plants are wonderful for aquariums
A quick poke around on the web to update myself found this article - I thought it was informative.
https://be.chewy.com/aquarium-snails-what-to-keep-and-what-to-avoid/