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I am in the prosses of starting over on my tank so right now all I have is some live plants, and quite a few ramshorn snails which I am in the prosses of getting rid of. anyway, as I was cleaning it today, I noticed a small clear object hanging off the bottom of a piece of driftwood, when I looked closer I saw it was moveing. Now what is it and should I be concerned. It is about 4mm long, but can stretch out to about 1cm or roll up into a 2mm ball. it is roughly tear drop shaped (when not streached) and the narrow end seems to be the head. the tail end has what looks like a suction cup. it is clear, and I can see a couple of brown organs. there may be another one hanging off of the fleshy part of one of the snails I removed. also the tank has not had fish for about 3 weeks now

The only thing that comes to my mind are leeches. We inherited an outside pond which has some of them, and although they are dark in colour, perhaps there are some who are clear in colour. Best thing is to do a research on google and verify it.

your right. It looks exactly like this

http://www.micrographia.com/specbiol/helmint/annelhom/hiru0100/leech-00.htm

So now what? anyone?

salting the water would get rid of them, leeches hate salt... That's about all I can think of. I HATE leeches! They're all over the lake I used to live by.

As I said, we have some of them in the outside pond, but I have never seen them attached to any of the fish. In an attempt to get rid of them, we emptied the pond cleaned everything and put a new liner. There are still some around and I take them out manually whenever I see one. Yes, I'm very brave.

At one point we had one in the fish tank too, after I put some pond gravel in the tank. The betta actually tried to eat it but the leech was too big for betta... As I was planning on changing the gravel and as it didn't seem to attack any fish but lived in the gravel, I didn't panic. Eventually, I found it dead one day, before I changed the gravel.

I think I know why it died. I treated my tank with Levacide (a dewromer for cattle containing Levamisole Hydrochloride) to get rid of parasitic nematodes in my fish's intestines and it was found dead later. On the other hand, it might be a coincidence...

According to the university of Kentucky, Copper Sulfate Pentahydrate is the only registered treatment for leeches. More on that here. Salt is also an answer, and Interpet no. 12 (Do you have that in the USA) is also said to treat leeches. As you don't have any fish in the water, I guess you can try them all one after the other...

One thing to think about is that their eggs and their earlly stages are cocoon-like, and none of those treatments will kill them at that stage.

Hope it can be of any help...

Last edited by untitled at 22-Dec-2004 05:17