Uninvited Guests

[blainep]

Cleaning out the Haustrum tank today, I found some uninvited guests - worms, lots of em.

Tried to get some pics, hard to get a decent focus, but.....

They appear slightly similar to an earthworm in body, able to squish up short and round or stretch out long and thin.

http://tlfs.org/ntanks/worms/big1.jpg

http://tlfs.org/ntanks/worms/big2.jpg

http://tlfs.org/ntanks/worms/big3.jpg

This is picture of what I thought was just hair algae, until I noticed it was wiggling like crazy

http://tlfs.org/ntanks/worms/little1.jpg


Any thoughts as to what they are? Good,bad or indifferent ?

[Melody]

Google Planaria - that's the most likely answer. They'll drive the snails nuts so I'd get rid of them ASAP if that's the case.:wideeyed:

[blainep]

Well, I've been Googling for a while, as far as I can tell the larger worms are Planaria, not sure about the small thin worms yet.

I removed all the Haustrum snails and gave them as much of an inspection as they would permit.
Kinda funny, a couple of them just hung out and let peek in at them, couple others closed right up and two others were to busy getting laid to notice me poking at them. :laugh:

It's not the first time I've handled them, in my attempts to get the other pest snails out of their tank, I've picked them up and picked off the offending snails. Maybe some of them remember.

As far as I could tell, none of them had any visible worms on them and I've moved them out of that tank into a new one for them.

Opinions seem to vary alot on the Planaria worm, anywhere from 'no big deal' to 'the end of the world' for the aquarium.
Opinions for treatment seem to vary just as much ! Everything from 'leave them be' to 'sterilization by radiation'.

Any thoughts from the CAC members ?

Now that the snails are out, I might remove the rest of the tank and sterilize and rebuild it.

Still wondering how they got there, that tank has been running smoothly for months.

[Melody]

Planaria gets big too. I sent some pic's to Mr. Mykiss once so he could use his fishy biology smarts to ID some big ugly brown worms for me and Planaria was the reply, hence my response. They start out small though. Maybe there's more than one species.

Whether they hurt anything or not depends a lot on what you're doing. They're not good for snails and if you're trying to spawn anything, they do eat eggs. Otherwise they're harmless as an entity, but the problems they come with can be harmful. They arrive when there's overfeeding as a rule, which of course can effect the tank occupants with pollution & the like. Gravel debris is often the culprit.

The only real way to get rid of them that I know of is to take the tank down and bleach it. You can starve the population out over time like you can with pest snails, but if you can just as easily bleach, you might as well bleach. I also treated the snails with PraziPro, but there were visible worms.

If you feed fresh vegies, that could be the avenue in all by itself, or plants for that matter. Bits and pieces can get into the gravel, etc.

That's my take on them anyways. They're reasonably common so I'm sure others have thoughts to share too.