"things" in my tank

[B Considine]

Turned on the lights this morning to see the front glass with numerous tiny white worms and some copepod type things on it. Tank otherwise houses 8-10 cherry shrimp. I can only guess the new inhabitants hitched a ride on a plant.

All these critters are probably les than 1mm at present. But there are a lot of them. If they stayed out of sight, I wouldn't mind as much, but they seem to like the center of the front glass, where the return from the filter supplies a good current.

I wasn't planning on housing any fish in this tank, so how to get rid of them? I will add fish, if necessary. It's a 5.5 gal, so it can't house much.

Blaise

[JMLenke]

is the tank relative new?

IIRC those are nothing to worry about unless they are hanging on the fish.

[B Considine]

Tank is about 3 weeks old. Only occupants until today were the cherry shrimp and a few tiny snails.

[SCMurphy]

You are going to see small critters in a fishless tank. You'd see them in a fish tank but they get eaten. Most of them will hide when the light is on, so enjoy the miniature zoo.

[JMLenke]

Yeah those are planaria(sp?) IIRC and are fine in the tank and to be expected in newer tanks. They are not really dangerous to anything but fish eggs.

[JMLenke]

http://www.aquariacentral.com/forums/ar ... 23514.html

[B Considine]

I might disagree about the worms being planaria, though I haven't used a magnifying glass. They do not appear to have a "head" let alone "eyes". They are clearly round, not flat.

I've been feeding the shrimp about 1/3 a Hikari algae wafer every other day. I guess even that's been too much. Water change tonight.

The tank isn't particularly heavily planted (yet). I've got some sag subulata from my 30 that's starting to send out runners, as well as some overflow sunset hygro. I did plant 3 of 7 downoi from last weekend's auction on Tuesday, but I don't think they hitched a ride on those, as they were in a tupperware container since Saturday and I didn't see a thing. I'll blame a lobelia cardinalis I bought at a local a couple of weeks back.

So who eats these? Anything? Everything? Is there a nice small fish or 2 that will be happy in such a small tank? My original thought was to wait until found some dwarf corys. But I'm open to suggestions.

[Aaron]

Could they be hydra?

[B Considine]

Could they be hydra?

Don't think so. They aren't branched, and lay flat against the glass. But everything's so small right now, who know what they could be. The copepods couldn't be shrimplets, could they?

[Cristy Keister]

Probably daphnia or scuds. Baby shrimp just look like tiny versions of the adults.