Tyler Fishman
- #1
we love our mts, they stir are substrate, dig, but very slowly ma s they can easily overpopulate a tank.
One female can reproduce by parthenogenesis, meaning she can produce viable young without the need for a mate, of course these young sport no genetic diversity since they are all clones of the mother and essentially all female.
My tank was founded on one 1 inch long snail, there are now 200+ Snails ranging from all sizes in my tank, and for me this isn’t really a problem, but for the average fish keeper oh boy, it is.
So I have a solution... giant worms. That’s right giant aquatic worms. I don’t know anything about these worms taxonomy, they could be specialized earthworms, or even freshwater polychate worms; all I know is that they are 100% inconspicuous during the day and never surface. This makes it an ideal candidate for people who don’t want to see snails crawling about.
They are more active at night, when I wake up in the morning and look at my tank I seed tunnels about 2mm in diameter. The worm itself is about 3-4 inches long and resembles an earthworm, it has a glossy rainbow sheen when light reflects of it and travels at a decent speed through my dirted tank. I have areas in my tank where the dirt layer is almost 5 inches and I’ve had no hydrogen sulfide issues!
The problem with mts is that they just stir the surface layers. This worms gets down into the substrate all the way down. I likely got this worm by A stream where there are aquatic worms, I probably was trying to feed it to my betta, or another likely candidate is it came in large clump of Eleocharis acicularis I picked up on the margins of a pond.
If you can get these guys in your planted tank you’ll be surprised at the job they do for it.
One female can reproduce by parthenogenesis, meaning she can produce viable young without the need for a mate, of course these young sport no genetic diversity since they are all clones of the mother and essentially all female.
My tank was founded on one 1 inch long snail, there are now 200+ Snails ranging from all sizes in my tank, and for me this isn’t really a problem, but for the average fish keeper oh boy, it is.
So I have a solution... giant worms. That’s right giant aquatic worms. I don’t know anything about these worms taxonomy, they could be specialized earthworms, or even freshwater polychate worms; all I know is that they are 100% inconspicuous during the day and never surface. This makes it an ideal candidate for people who don’t want to see snails crawling about.
They are more active at night, when I wake up in the morning and look at my tank I seed tunnels about 2mm in diameter. The worm itself is about 3-4 inches long and resembles an earthworm, it has a glossy rainbow sheen when light reflects of it and travels at a decent speed through my dirted tank. I have areas in my tank where the dirt layer is almost 5 inches and I’ve had no hydrogen sulfide issues!
The problem with mts is that they just stir the surface layers. This worms gets down into the substrate all the way down. I likely got this worm by A stream where there are aquatic worms, I probably was trying to feed it to my betta, or another likely candidate is it came in large clump of Eleocharis acicularis I picked up on the margins of a pond.
If you can get these guys in your planted tank you’ll be surprised at the job they do for it.