bugs???

[sharrah27]

I have a 20 gl with one perch and one crayfish. they were both brought home from the pond meant as a gift for my 4 yr old. anyway i have had them for a couple of months now and i have started to notice weird things in the water. there are tiny squiggly things and i have also noticed some kind of bugs living in the gravel. they are also really small only noticed them when i vacuum the gravel. i have also started to notice something wrong with the perch.He has some little blood spots on him like maybe something is munching on him? i have looked all through the net nothing sounds like what im seeing. they are not round and flat like fish lice.please help?

 

[jaylin]

Tiny and squiggly ... do their heads look a bit like an arrow? Sounds like flatworms to me (dugesia, planaria .. it's all the same stuff). Fairly harmless, but not to pretty to look at. http://ebiomedia.com/gall/classics/Plan/planaria.html (Actually, I think they have pretty cool looking muppet eyes ... but, well, I'm a bit of a freshwater invert fan.)

Now the blood spots ... are they mostly around the gills? Having come from the wild, it could be a number of things. One thing that popped into my mind is glochidium. Some bivalves have a parasitic larval stage that lodges into fish. It's looks ugly, probably isn't all that comfortable for the fish but it won't kill them. If that is what it is, they'll eventually fall off the fish and you'll have baby clams or something soon enough.

Although ... it could be almost anything. It's really hard to know without pictures.