Ugly worms in my sustrate

patoloco

patoloco

De seguro no sabes lo que dice aqu
Oct 20, 2005
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wetpatoloco.tripod.com
Hi there. I have this 20 gallon tank with pebbles sustrate housing a small koi, a goldfish, a small pleco and a cory. They keep my gravel terribly dirty and keep clogging the filter.

About a motnh ago I was vaccuming the bottom and saw this brown worm in the syphon. It looked a lot like a leech, and was attaching to the plastic tube with one of his ends. When left untouched, they will be long like 1", but when touched the shrink a lot.

Yestarday, I decided to go deep into the susbtrate and saw at least a hundred :eek: :eek: :eek: of those worms being sucked into the bucket. I refilled the tank with the same water and repeated the vaccum stirring gravel a lot and there came many more worms.

I'm almost certain that I took almos all off, but also I'm certain that many more will grow.


Any idea of what I'm facing? Are thay dangerous to my fish? What to do to get rid of them?

Help. I promise I will never start a syphon by sucking on it.
 
Well I tried to do a search on your worms. No luck.

What are your tank conditions? Water tests? Since you mentioned a lot of waste, that may be conntributing to your worms.

I noted more that you have a koi with tropical fish AND that you have a koi and goldfish in a pretty small tank with other fish, AND that you have a cory all by his lonesome. Is this their permanent home?
 
Do you feed any frozen foods???

I had the some problem (per description) and it was because I overfed frozen bloodworm and they thawed and grew in my substrate.

It really did not cause a problem at all. Tank H2O parameters always were the same and safe. Unless there is an unusually large number of them, I would not worry.

However, PICS are great and can help us determine if this is a problem or not.

Good Luck

Aries
 
"worms" in the substrate are almost always a result of over feeding and insufficient maintainance. the worms can't make a living in a tank without enough food in the gravel for them to eat. want to be rid of them? VERY THOROUGHLY vacuum the gravel and stop overfeeding.

in your specific case you've got a severely over crowded tank. koi are POND fish. they grow to over a foot and cannot possibly be maintained in a twenty gallon tank no matter how small they are right now. goldfish and koi both are extremely messy feeders and put out alot of waste as you've found out. thus goldfish need larger tanks ... a small GF needs ten gallons and larger ones need twenty gallons just for them alone, and you've got other fish in there with them.

too, you've got temperate water (cool water) fish (koi and goldfish) in with tropical fish. they cannot be kept in the same temperature water, so you need to either rehome the GF or get another tank for your other fish. take the koi back to the shop ... you don't have a pond.

corydoras are social fish and do best in groups of at least 3.
 
Do you feed any frozen foods???

I had the some problem (per description) and it was because I overfed frozen bloodworm and they thawed and grew in my substrate.
Click to expand...

Sorry Aries, I gotta call bull on that one. Maybe you had worms because you were overfeeding with bloodworms, but bloodworms could not have come back to life in your tank.

Everyone has worms in their tanks. It's the pop density of the worms we need to worry about. In a well maintained tank you should not see worms durring the day, or notice "a bunch" being sucked up when you gravel vac.
 
Bloodworms are insect larvae :) You said they look brown... so they may be hatching :( They are harmless but it definetly means you are overfeeding.
 
Hi,

They sound like the leeches what live in ponds.

I have a pond and once put some weed out of the pond into my goldfish tank. I washed it first, but there must have been small leeches or eggs on it i didn't see. I noticed them like you when I was siphoning the tank.

They are harmless to fish, they are the earthworms of ponds, just eating waste and breaking it down. You don't want them in your tank though!

I found pond salt killed them, I didnt like the thought of sucking one up either! I put the fish and most of the water in another tank and put a salt solution in the remaining gravel, they all came up to the surface and died. Then rinsed out the gravel and put fresh water with the old water and fish back. The salt whats left will be diluted enough to be harmful to the fish and filter. You have tropical fish though, so I don't know if this method would be okay for you to try. Please wait until you have more information from people on here what know more than I do about the tropical fish.

Ange
 
Bloodworms coming back to life!!!! Ahhhhh!

Bloodworms are too tiny to match what you describe. They sound more like leeches.
Could they have come from the Koi? If they hitched a ride on/in it somehow?

Leech info:
The cocoon is either buried or attached to a rock, log or leaf and dries to a foamy crust. After several weeks or months, the young emerge as miniature adults. Studies show that the cocoons are capable of surviving the digestive system of a duck. Leeches die after one or two bouts of reproduction.

but it doesn't seem as if they would flourish in your tank:
Most leeches are sanguivorous, that is they feed as blood sucking parasites on preferred hosts. If the preferred food is not available most leeches will feed on other classes of host. Some feed on the blood of humans and other mammals, while others parasitise fish, frogs, turtles or birds. Some leeches will even take a meal from other sanguivorous leeches which may die after the attack.

This info was taken from: http://www.austmus.gov.au/factsheets/leeches.htm

Thanks for helping me learn about leeches today!;)
 
Thank for all the help. I call myself guilty for the koi and GF in that 20 gallon. Actually, I bought them for a pond that had been built in myu mom's front yard, but the concrete cracked very badly and the water loss was too evident.

I just built a 230 gallon tank, but it's housing bigger fish, so it's a bad idea to put these fish there. I'm in a predicament right now, but I'm figuring out a way to solve it.

Now i believe I have some kind of leeches. I've been feeding frozen bloodworms, but I don't think they will thaw to life again. I will start a strong gravel cleaning routine right now.

Thank a lot.
 
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