Little White Worms

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T

ThePBM

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Jun 26, 2007
602
1
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Hawaii / Wisconsin
I took home some (what i've identified as) coontail from a lake today. I put them into a 10 gal with conditioned water and an airstone with 6500k lighting.
I can see these very small white worm things floating at all levels of the water. Some on the bottom, some in the middle, some right by the top. These are like less than 1mm in thickness at about 1/4 inch in length. They're just wriggling around and they are not bloodworms. They are not visible from like 2 feet away from the tank, gotta look close.

Anyone have any ideas what these might be? Are they parasites? Would they be bad for my fish? I picked out one of them and put it into my fish tank but my fish showed no interest in it, so it's not food.
 
planaria i think they are called. they don't harm fish are there cause you are probably overfeeding and they are picking up the excess. this is just a guess, hope thats what they are cause they aren't bad for fish at all, and are actually good for a tank although i'd prefure to not have them.

they should go away though.

get a pic to be sure of it
 
Planaria most likely
they wont harm your fish
usually a sign of over feeding
theyre eating leftover food or waste
some times they can be in substrate you put in
i got a tank from a friend and some substrate
tank was fine then when i put substrate in
all kinds of planaria

i would say cut down on feeding a lil
do extra water changes
and add a lil aquarium salt
 
Like i said, they were not put into a tank with fish. Overfeeding was not what was happening, as there was nothing to feed in that tank. It was more or less a quarantine tank for these plants before i figured if they were safe for my fish tank.
I looked up planaria, and these worms i'm talking about are round and are not crawling along anything. just wriggling in the water like a bloodworm might, except not at the surface of the water.
 
could be a parasite that came with fish
definitely quarantine them
and dont mix with fish you have already
they may be able to tolerate the parasite
but other fish may not
 
add salt lots of salt that should get rid of them
 
I used to have something thats sounds exactly like that in a ten gallon I had. I never new what they were called, and they were really hard to get rid of, but they never seemed to harm the fish. I looked at some pics of planaria and that is definitely not what I had. I agree with x24, Post some pics if possible. Thats the best way any of us can help.
 
too small for my camera to get pics of, unfortunately. but they've disappeared overnight, so any further information would be to serve my curiosity.
 
I had the same problem and my neighbor that works for dept. of nat. resourses told me that they were nematodes.Im not a scientist but if i understood him right they are harmless. Iforgot to mention he did look at them under a microscope
 
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