[Mirkinator]

Are these worms parasites? Anyone know what they feed off? Can they affect the health of my other fish if they get into one of their tanks? Want to make sure they arent dangerous and whether I should scrap this tank and start over.

This is my Live foods test tank, been trying my hand at live foods and raising daphnia. Currently just trying to raise pond snails for my puffers and loaches and daphnia. I finally got a decent set up, green water galore and they started to explode, got several harvests in and then they all crashed. Tank has been running for about 4 weeks, I did seed the gravel from an old tank, but havent tested my water yet.

But what ive read on them is you can keep them in a 5gal bucket and put algae in each day with few water changes. I realize this is probably not the best instructions as we all know that toxins/NH4+/ etc will all build up w/o them. So I decided on a 10gal with under gravel filters running 2x air pumps. I put some green water in and run a 24w 6500k CFL bulb over it with some floaters. Green water bloomed so well, i rarely had to ever put any extra in for the lil buggers, but I cant seem to keep them alive. Funny thing is they live just fine in my water lily jar which i never put any food in. Any ideas on this?

WORMS (little white lines errrywhere):

Water Lily tank (had daphnia in it longer then 10gal, breeding very nicely):

 

[Mirkinator]

Wow, so you did almost nothing with the attic tank? Hmm, I tried them at first in a little 4 gal, but I couldnt keep the filter going, even with a nylon mesh covering it, kept sucking them up. Starch started to get really nasty too. I then tried to just let them hang and they starting dying off (green water wasnt ready), so I changed my attack plan to a under gravel filter running only air bubbles through those tower things. again worked good for a few weeks

The sticky in this forum says they do best with a sponge filter, so i will try that. Also maybe the snails upset teh balance as they are breeding like cray cray. I will order another batch and see what I can try to do to keep them alive. Was hoping there was some smoking gun

 

[Mirkinator]

Oh and I was checking around online, someone says they may be detrius worms too. after they started dying I did a water change and (like you) seems to finish just about all of them off and when I was gravel filtering it was TONS of gunk. Will keep fiddling with it, but might have to kill the snails. But not sure how to do only them and not kill the tank...