maggie

lol, ok so today i was stirring up the gravel in my 10 gal and noticed a bunch of white hairs floating around. no biggie i've seen em before, just not as many. then i notice my fish going nuts eating the hairs. so i'm like hmmm thats odd. so i look closer and notice these "hairs" are wriggling! ahhh they are worms! is this bad? should i do some sort of extermination? or is that normal? my fish really like em though and it was kinda fun to watch them eat. any suggestions on what to do or what these little wormies are?

Chief_waterchanger

Might be planaria, in which case I would say you are probably overfeeding the tank. I would cut back a little on how much you feed the tank, but no big worries. Most fish eat these little worms. The reason they do not get noticed until you overfeed is because the fish eat them so readily, but when the tank has an abundance of nutrients (more than the fish need) the worms are able to multiply faster than the fish eat them, usually.

If they are not planaria it is another worm of some sort so basic principle still applies, in my opinion.

(Just tell your non-fishkeep friends that the worms are a rare worm from some weirdo location that only a few people in the world have... that'll get you cool points. )

maggie

haha sweet, i think i'll have rare weird worms from Tanzania!

yea the over feeding thing would make sense. i had some rasboras that wouldn't let any body else eat so i was putting more food in, in hopes everyone would get some. i moved them into another tank so maybe they wormies will go away now. thanks for the info