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My camera isn't good enough to take a picture. I found this thick white thing crawling across the glass. It moves about like my snails and at the same speed. It's solid white except the top looks like it has a little grey, about 1/4inch long when stretched out moving, and scrunches up when I touch it. It's body looks sort of like a stretched out triangle with the back being the thickest up to a round mouth that's only visible when it's flattened against the glass. Not sure where it could have come from. Everything I put in this tank has been in my other tanks for quite awhile.

i have had this problem also, but after my tank crashed, so i drained the tank, and cleaned it.

uh yeah sounds like it

As for how to get rid of them? There are many ways, none of which are totally easy...If you don't have any fish in the tank that are copper resistant most treatments for snails I believe will work, but you have to watch for an ammonia spike as these evil little creatures are dyinglike you need anything else to worry about right?

Now the good thing I can tell you, if we have the same type of leeches then I have never seen them bother the fish, but seem to be a type that eats the extra gunk left in the tank:%)this version I'm gonna post a picture of I had as well as another kindthese seemed to have disappeared on their own, the others I still see more than I want to admit

Heidi



houston attached this image:


"I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom." Thomas Carlyle

A lot of leeches are actually capable of eating detritus and plant sap when young, but some will go for blood as they age. Freshwater leeches hate salt, but that may be of little use as the concentrations that kill them are not likely to please the fish either, although you can bathe affected fish for a few munites until the leeches drop off.. Leeches share a huge amount of physionomical similarities with parasitic worms though, so if you can find a wormer that does not rely on chemical reaction with the host species liver, but treats the problem directly it will probably kill them. Ive seen "leechicides" in shops but you should be warned that not all are tested with tropical fish, and theyre not commonplace.Trichlorofon at 0.25 mg/l is a common choice. Leeches are however, more resistant to copper than a lot of other inverts.

You can actually set up leech traps using bottles, a bit like snail traps with very fresh bloody meat in and then remove the offending creatures. You can fill a sausage skin with blood ( where you wanna get it from though....)and drop it in the trap, actually an old trick for feeding medicinal leeches.

Last edited by longhairedgit at 10-Oct-2005 19:21

The body shape doesn't look like any pictures of leeches that I've found but the mouth and head area seem to match. It's in my 5g that was cycling with some trumpet snails. Which means it survived an ammonia level of 3 and nitrites off the chart. Even though the tank is pretty much cycled I started finding empty small snail shells so maybe it's eating the snails? Everything in that tank was bought dry from the lfs or taken from other tanks so I really don't know why it showed up now. I looked in every other tank but saw none and I haven't even seen that one again. I may have to rescue a few of my snails and then dose the tank with something to kill it.

sham,
could it be planaria?


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I've had planaria in several other tanks and it never looked like that. They generally looked like little white worms. Even when I let them grow they didn't get anywhere near as thick as this thing. It doesn't really have a worm shape to it. All the pics I've seen of leeches have a long wormlike body that may be fatter in the middle depending how well fed it is but still have sort of a tail at the end. This thing is basically triangle shaped. The tail end is flat at the back with rounded corners and then it tapers down to the head. When it scrunched up it looked exactly like a flattened white triangle with a round mouth at one corner. Then the corner with the mouth stretches forward and glides across the glass.

could be a large flukeworm eeeuuuuurghhh!

"5g that was cycling with some trumpet snails"

How long did that take to cycle?

Last edited by openwater at 11-Oct-2005 17:21

Actually the trumpet snails multiplied very quickly and with the extra food left around the tank it has taken about a month and gone through a good cycle. Much higher ammonia and nitrites than I normally let my cycling tanks get up to. Kinda got stuck in the nitrite phase. There was a population explosion just as the nitrites started to go down so the tank ended up with a bit of ammonia again or it would have been cycled a week ago.
I described the creature to my boyfriend and he said I was seeing things so we went to check the tank. Didn't find the big one but there were 2 littler ones. At first I thought they were snails but even the tiniest baby snails have a visible chunk of shell and after looking at them the shape was different from a snail foot.

uh shami decided to remove all my substrate at one point to get rid of the evil little demons (ok they haven't attached to anything, but ugh they unnerve me) That was about 3 months ago. I left the container outside to "dry out" and then brought it in, and put the lid on the container and put it in the closet, to deal with later (yes, i'm a procrastinator, what are you going to do about it?) Well, this past weekend I needed the bucket again to remove more gravel from another tank (I was redoing the tank, and needed a place to put the gravel I was rinsing off to put in the tank) so I decided I hadn't used the gravel in 3 months, it was taking up room, I went outside and through it in a flowerbeddon't tell the landladywell, at the bottom of the container, low and behold I found more flipping leeches]:|NO they were not dead, YES I think they had multiplied]:| as I had some that were quite a bit smaller than the others in this "dry" bucket with just gravel...

So needless to say (and I was told this before, but it didn't dawn on me I'd experience it) These stupid things can survive without food or water for at least 3 months, about 2 weeks outside in the Texas Heat, and they were still aliveso I don't know for sure how long they would live in "dried" out conditions, but I'm sure it is longer than we really want to think about, and it is possible they came in on some plants, driftwood, substrate, or other "decoration".

Heidi



houston attached this image:


"I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom." Thomas Carlyle

Well unlike most people I see an odd white possible leech creature and I go cool what's that, what happens if I touch it? My reason for wanting a saltwater tank is for all the odd creatures you find on the liverock not the colorful fish. If they don't harm my fish and don't multiply out of control I really don't care if they exist. I'm only worried they'll harm my sparkling gouramis I was planning on putting in that tank or get into my 90g with all the other fish, snails, and shrimp.