tiny worms

[rickztahone]

i was doing my weekly water changes today. when all the new water was in and all the stuff pack in it's place i stayed looking at my fish (naturally :D) and i noticed small, i mean tiny little white squiggly little things that resembled worms in movement. i'm scared they might be some type of parasite. is there any way to get rid of them? i'm sure it's not a good thing that they are there. i tried to get them out but that was pretty much impossible since they are so tiny. i only saw about 4 of them but i'm sure there were some more. please advise

[Eddie]

Its planaria, comes from overfeeding and not wiping everything down in the tank daily. Formalin was the thing that I used that knocked them out but it will kill your bio filter too so just keep the tank clean and don't overfeed. They are harmless to Discus.

Eddie

[rickztahone]

thank you very much basshead, that makes me feel a lot better. currently i'm feeding my discus 3 times a day. tetra bits in the morning, tropical flakes in the afternoon and bloodworms in the evenings. they would come from the bloodworms i would presume? i use a magfloat to clean my tank, not sure if that's what you mean by wiping it down. my discus are about 2.5" and i haven't been sure if i am indeed over-feeding them. they eat all of it fairly quickly though. once again, i thank you for such a quick reply. i look forward to introducing myself properly and posting some pics of my tank on this site soon. i am a noob btw which i'm sure you realized :D

[Eddie]

Nice to meet you and welcome to SimplyDiscus. It's an awesome site as you may have already noticed. There are plenty of people here to help you like the Pros and novices. I'm a novice Discus keeper but I have successfully kept discus since 1996. I'm no breeder at all but looking to role down that alley in the future! :D Everything I learned about discus was from books initially and then I stumbled onto this site which is full of great info.

You can search for the word planaria and you will get tons of threads on them. Everybody gets shocked when they see some iddy bity teeny weeny worms squirming around in the tank. I have them in my tanks and I try to keep them under control by wiping everything down and doing WCs. You can see them crawling on the glass. It really isn't worth the effort of dropping formalin into the tank to kill them cause formalin is tough chemical. It'll kill your bio among other things if not used appropriately.

HTH
Eddie

[rickztahone]

Nice to meet you and welcome to SimplyDiscus. It's an awesome site as you may have already noticed. There are plenty of people here to help you like the Pros and novices. I'm a novice Discus keeper but I have successfully kept discus since 1996. I'm no breeder at all but looking to role down that alley in the future! :D Everything I learned about discus was from books initially and then I stumbled onto this site which is full of great info.

You can search for the word planaria and you will get tons of threads on them. Everybody gets shocked when they see some iddy bity teeny weeny worms squirming around in the tank. I have them in my tanks and I try to keep them under control by wiping everything down and doing WCs. You can see them crawling on the glass. It really isn't worth the effort of dropping formalin into the tank to kill them cause formalin is tough chemical. It'll kill your bio among other things if not used appropriately.

HTH
Eddie

thanks for the warm welcome, nice to meet you. after reading stuff from cichilid-forum.com and being referred to here i have done drastic changes to my tank. that's why i feel like i should have researched before i bought but i had one discus in my lonely 35g tank for over 2 years and he held well. still have him/her actually. then i thought i would get into discus and bought a lot of them after i had just purchased my 55g. now i see that stocking 6 2" discus and one large one will not due in that tank. but that's why i say i should've researched. now i know and i'm going to take proper steps to correct it. so far i have eliminated my UGF, darker substrate, took a lot of stuff out of the tank that should have been there and a lot of minor stuff. i've always done WC on a weekly basis though. like i said, i will post a thread on this later as i do not have much time now. but once again, thank you for your help.

[Eddie]

No problem, always here to help or at least point you in the direction. Resourcefulness is my number 1 trait!.