what are worms doing in my tank?

K

kYle223

AC Members
Dec 27, 2009
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Woooooooorms!
i honestly never heard of worms in an aquarium but yesterday i was just looking in my snail/shrimp breeding 10gal tank and i saw a little white stringy thing moving up and down my java moss
so i looked around a bit more and shure enuf i saw another worm on the moss and maybe 2 or 3 white sqiggles crawling around on the black sand

so now this raises the questions
what are they?
are they good or bad?
where do they come frome?
how do i make them go away?
if i use the inverts as food will
^wuld that be bad for the pufferfish?
^they spread to the brackish tank?
will they harm annything?
 
Well, planaria are common in shrimp tanks because of the high nutrient/low flow combination typical of these tanks. They have a distinct arrow shaped head. If they aren't planaria, I'm not sure what they are...
 
actually now that you mention flow
i uped the flow ALOT last night by attatching a makeshift spraybar made out of filter tubing to a powerhead at the opposite end of the tank frome the filter because there seemed to be an offle lot of waste that dident get sucked up into the filter


and now today i cant seem to find any of the worms to compare to those pictures
sooooooooooooooo do you think that the flow might have?
 
Oh, maybe they were mosquito larvae then! I bet that's what they were if upping the flow got rid of them. And it is getting warmer nowadays...
 
mosqito larve?
this tank is in my bedroom?
WTF?
that is so strange
anyway you said that shrimp tanks usually have low flow
does that mean higher flow is bad? i dont want there fry to get tossed around in there and die?
 
Oh no, it's not bad. Snails and shrimp prefer sponge filters, box filters, internal filters - etc. which all have lower flow than power filters or canisters, but it should still be enough to ripple the surface.

If you keep them in unfiltered tanks you will definitely have problems with bugs unless you keep the tank completely covered. Sometimes the air driven filters can clog to the point where they are barely rippling the surface, so I can see problems with bugs being a possibility then too. So just make sure the surface is rippling, and don't let uneaten food or other debris build up too much. This attracts things like planaria, so even if that's not what it was this time, it could still happen. By the way here is an unmagnified image of mosquito larvae:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/6500519/2/istockphoto_6500519-mosquito-larvae.jpg

It's hard to mistake them, they do that thing where they sort of "pulse" as they swim around, so maybe it wasn't mosquito larvae. It just sounds like a possibility to me because of the fact that increasing the flow seemed to solve the problem. Other common FW critters are not so easy to get rid of...
 
could be tubifex(tho usually red in color) there is also the black worm( good thing as fish eat these as well as tubifex)
 
nope its definately not mosquito larve but its gone now
as for the filter i have a biowheele filter with one of those blue filter sponges covering the intake so i had good flow to start ?
and the snailes gobble up all of the food?
now im really confused as to WTF those things were
 
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