Sooooo this is weird. I was looking at the gravel in my tank very closely and I saw what I thought to be very small, newly hatched pond snails, but one left the rock it was perched on and SWAM away quite rapidly. I was pretty surprised to see this and upon looking around the tank, saw a LOT more of them. They are about the size of a grain of sand, look just like the little white dots that are in the egg clusters my pond snails lay, but I thought newly hatched snails were exactly like like their parents only smaller. Are they able to swim freely about the tanks as newborns, or do i have some other sort of strange creatures in my tank??

Snails cannot swim. They can crawl or fall if free in the water. It sounds like you have some sort of micro-animal such as daphnia, scuds, or some kind of copepod. Based on their size of a grain of sand, that would rule out daphnia and scuds which are larger. You probably have copepods. They're harmless. Baby snails hatch looking the same shape as their parents but their shells are softer and may be lighter in color.

Thanks for that info Robyn. I also had a similiar experience with lots of tiny swimming things in my tank a few month ago. But they were shaped more like worms long and thin (about 1/16 of a inch long) rather than tiny snails. I cleaned the tank out and added a small amount of aquariam salt and haven't seen any since. But I wondered what it was and if it was harmful to the other fish, who seem to be doing fine since then.