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I have heard stories about people getting something like rock or wood and getting like an eel or some type of animal. Is this true or how does this happen?

Chris

With saltwater that's very common,well maybe not eels very often, but various critters often show up in liverock. I've got a couple serpent starfish and had a destructive mystery crab that I had to get rid of. They just showed up one day after I put the liverock in. I've heard of a few people who found small gobies hiding in their rocks when they added them to the tank. Most freshwater decorations are dried and so don't have any creatures in them aside from maybe leeches which can withstand being dried. If you pull rocks or wood out of a natural body of water or from someone elses tank there's a chance you could end up with something. More likely though you'll just get snails.

Most introductions in freshwater don't come with rocks and wood, but rather from plants, which can have snails, snail eggs, hydra, or something else. Of course, can doesn't mean will, so don't make me scare you away from buying plants forever. In any case, anything really huge would be hard to miss when transporting plants. As sham said, rocks and wood generally come off the shelf dry, so they probably won't contain living things that you could introduce to your tank.

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The aquarist is one who must learn the ways of the biologist, the chemist, and the veterinarian.

Loads of goodies come on plants

I recently got a Leica microscope (big shnazzy lab grade one ) and I've been lookin' at different water samples I've taken out of my tanks. Thus far, in my FW tanks, I've found and identified various paramecia, rotifers, diatoms, cyclops (not sure of genus name?), daphnia, infusoria, about 10 different kinds of algae (several of which are various varieties of cyano)... several different worm-ish looking little guys, etc, etc

The only bad things that can come with plants are basically snails and parasites and diseases, but if you wash/clean and/or bleach the plants before you put them in your tank, you should be just fine

HTH