Elassoma gilberti: Round 2!

Interesting. Do you know if the leeches are attacking snails too? (Or can you test this in a jar?) If worms are their preferred prey, which seems to be the consensus among most aquarists who have observed blackworm leeches, then I'm guessing that snails would be more similar to their normal food than a fish would. Thousands of aquarists feed their fish blackworms and this is the first I've heard of blackworm leeches attacking an otherwise healthy fish. (I suspect any leech will eat a dead or dying fish).

I still have a pair of gilberti plus a few fry, and will try to save more fry in case you need to restock. Usually I have more, but lately i've been short on time to care for fry and fry-food cultures.

Yeah, it surprised me, too. I haven't seen them attacking the snails, but there aren't many in there.

Leeches attacking fish is like a myth, right? I didn't believe it when I found the first male dead with the wound on him (I've killed fish lots of times, so there was no proof yet it was specifically leeches). But now after waking up to that this morning there is no doubt.

It's fine if the leeches are in there grossing me out, I don't care. Eating eggs? That's a problem. Attacking the fish? Now it's time for all out war. I'm going to get this tank leech free and then we'll see what's left when the dust settles. As I count them tonight, the surviving fish are going to go into the 10 gallon tank I'd held reserved for fry. Updates will come later tonight/tomorrow.

NO !!! There are plenty of other leech species that frequently feed on fish, frogs, newts, crayfish, turtles, etc. I have occasionally caught wild fish (bluehead chubs and others) with leeches on them. But the typical "blackworm leech" doesn't usually feed on live fish, based on aquarium reports. I'd like to find out what species they are, and if they're reported in scientific lit to feed on vertebrates.

Here's a key to N.Amer leeches, if you or anybody (Auban?) wants to have at it ...
http://nepis.epa.gov...FieldOp=0&Docs=

Leeches attacking fish is like a myth, right?

If you want, I could collect some and ship them to you. In a perfect world, when I get home today none will be left alive. But I bet there will still be hundreds. If you or Auban want some, just send me a private message with your address and I can ship them to you for free.
Respond fast: I plan to kill all the leeches by this time tomorrow. I'll evacuate the tank of fish and turn it marine. I can always replant it later. These leeches have to go.

Update:
I worked super late and didn't get a chance that day to remove the fish and add more salt to the tank. It spent about two days at high but tolerable (for the fish) salt levels. Hundreds of leeches died. The betta seems fine.

I'm liking this Canon Elph 330 HS a whole lot. It's way better than the Sanyo Xacti VPC PD2BK I had before that is now a brick. I got a few photos of the evergladei male, who is going in another tank once I catch the little bugger(s).

In an effort to help people learn the difference between elassoma evergladei and elassoma gilberti/okefenokee, I'm taking pictures of the evergladei males (I think there are two) until I can catch them and put them in the guppy tank. Apologies for not cleaning the glass; I thought I was just doing an emergency salt lowering water change and then he posed so nicely at the front glass that I got out my camera. It wasn't a planned photo shoot, and elassoma tend to wash out and look nothing like themselves in photo tanks anyway. ( photo boxed male gilberti: http://gallery.nanfa...ze_001.jpg.html )

Evergladei:

http://gallery.nanfa... right.jpg.html

http://gallery.nanfa...lash 2.jpg.html

Here I haven't used the flash.

http://gallery.nanfa...g left.jpg.html

Compare versus the thinner tail base of gilberti. It doesn't need to flash blue; the thin peduncle is clear. This is a girl, though, so I guess that's not a fair comparison because she's wider shaped because of her eggs. She's nice and plumped up and ready to breed.

http://gallery.nanfa...g left.jpg.html

For reference, here is a photo of a male gilberti from my previous population (and camera, this one was a sony cybershot, very nice):


If you look hard, you can see gilberti blue versus evergladei gold, gilberti thin peduncle versus evergladei wide, the gilberti pointed nose versus the flat rounded evergladei nose. It's hard to tell the difference, so I'll take some photos of this male(s) and post them here to contrast with the gilberti. I'll take a picture of the evergladei darkened and colored up, since I'm failing to catch him. But yeah, then into the guppy tank he goes. He'll like it in there, it's solid plants. I'll just have to start feeding two tanks grindal worms every day.

I'm so relieved the emergency salt worked. There's leech corpses everywhere. A lot of leeches are still alive. I'll keep the salt at a low but tolerable level for a few days until I can drain the tank, catch all the fish, put them in the 10 gallon tank, and increase the salt.

More photos so you can compare gilberti to my current evergladei male. These are fish from the previous population of gilberti:

Sorry to hear about the leech thing. I've been debating on blackworm cultures and have attempted it once with mixed results. I think that if I do go forward with them in the future I'll most likely keep them in their own tank. That'd give me the ability to clean and inspect them thoroughly before adding.

My elassoma love freshly hatched BBS and thawed adult brine shrimp.

In other news, I now have both my commercial fishing license and resident fish dealer license so we'll start carrying some natives in the near future after I have established healthy populations to work with. I'm familiar with a few e.gilberti spots sorta local to here but will likely be making a trip west to the tallahassee area next weekend. I've no idea where to look up down that way but I'll start digging up a few spots on the map if necessary.

I don't know what kind of results I'll have this time of year as I generally go sampling during the spring and early summer, but we'll see.

"I think that if I do go forward with them in the future I'll most likely keep them in their own tank. That'd give me the ability to clean and inspect them thoroughly before adding. "
That's not a bad idea. I think the kitty litter (clay) substrate has something to do with my uncommon leech situation. They're burrowers so it seems a rock substrate would impede their lifestyle. And if there's a fish bigger than one inch long in the tank, the leeches are eaten just as readily as the blackworms. I dumped over a dozen leeches into my neolamprologus multifasciatus tank. They're not very much bigger than elassoma, but it was enough and they gobbled those leeches up like they were candy. So there's probably a variety of factors that need to be present for leech-breeding success (failure?), and most tanks wouldn't be susceptible to an infestation.

Jetajockey, I'll keep you in mind for the future. I still at this point see both male and female gilberti, but the numbers are way lower than when I first added them to the tank, and there's no guarantee they'll survive this salt thing. Gerald, you too, if I run out of gilberti, I promise I won't turn this tank into anything else. I'll just wait for someone to have them available again, and then not repeat my blackworm mistake.

*sad chuckle* I said about the old thread that it was basically me documenting my mistakes for everyone. I'd hoped with this new setup that I'd have it more figured out, but it seems like I'm still just making mistake, mistake, mistake one after the other. Oh well. You live, you learn not to put blackworms in a clay bottom tank with no fish bigger than an inch there to eat the leeches that come with them. Last time I got lucky and the leeches ate one another until only Mega Leech survived. This time, not so lucky and they attacked my fish. *sighs*

I don't see any trace of feeding wounds on the Betta. The leeches were no doubt hungry and looking for something to eat, but it appears they did not bite into your Betta much, if at all. I'd guess the predatory and dead-animal scavenging leeches have mouth parts different from blood-feeding leeches. The blood-feeding ones are only a small fraction of leech species, but for obvious reasons they are the most familiar to most people. I just got a blackworm order yesterday and will see if I can ID some leeches with that US-EPA key (link in post #83 above).

Yeah, she seems fine. I am still going to kill all the leeches, though (the salt's up about as high as the fish can stand). Elassoma eggs don't have any defenses and lay right on the ground where the leeches are.

Update after the high salt treatment:
Bad news: I lost one dario dario and one elassoma (I think it was the second evergladei. I hunted down the other one and put it in the guppy tank).
Good news: Hundreds of leech corpses. I don't see any left alive, although I'm not calling them extinct just yet. But without a blackworm population like I had, I can't imagine them breeding up to the crazy numbers they were, regardless of if there are some left. The situation where there were hundreds of leeches suddenly starving and attacking is over.

Future plan: keep salt at moderate, fish-safe levels in the future to hurt the remaining leeches if there are any. Later today or in a few days, I'll replant. The ludwigia repens and myriophyllum pinnatum did not like the high salt at all. I've got lots more, though, in my other tanks, so that's no problem. I still see both genders of elassoma gilberti in the tank at the moment. I'm keeping an eye on them. They will either spawn, and the day is saved, or die, and I'll pay for more fish. But the tank water is finally clear (no more burrowing!), so whatever happens, I'll see it. I've got a gravel siphon and a bucket ready and will start siphoning water into the 10 gallon tank if I see dancing.

I will never again add blackworms to a clay substrate tank that only has one inch long elassoma in it. Lesson learned.

Oh, unrelated good news: Vinegar eels are awesome! I checked on the gallon container that I'd left in a dark corner. As I picked it up, the water became cloudy with many many worms falling off the apples floating at the surface. This is so neat. I am super glad for the local club meetings and for Anthony Looney bringing vinegar eels. These are waaaaay less work than microworms (none, actually), and there are tons of them! It's awesome
Also, the baby brine shrimp hatcheries are still working great. The other tank I have one in, the neolamprologus multifasciatus tank, has a population of fish in it that stubbornly refused to breed or to fatten up with eggs. Now, just recently, there is fattening occurring and I think there might be fry soon Yay for finally getting smarter about microfoods. Breeding fry food is not as hard as I thought it would be

And, since I'm giving you all updates, the rotalla wallichii in the 10 gallon tank has died off. It did not like not having a heater. I'm mulling over buying a 10 gallon heater and putting it in there. It's vital that there be plants in the 10 gallon for hiding places for the fry. Alternatively, I could put in some ceratophyllum, but I've got a whole bunch of that in my 55 gallon guppy tank and it doesn't bring in the money that the rotalla does. Rotalla's rarer and sells for way more. So it might be monetarily worth buying a heater and devoting the 10 gallon to the rotalla, which gets smothered and doesn't have enough room in the 55 gallon. *shrugs* Not sure if you guys wanted to know that, but apparently temperature might affect gender ratio in the fry, so I'll report if there's a heater in the 10 gallon or not.
No matter what plant I pick, I've learned my lesson about surface plants, oxygen exchange, and light reaching the rest of the plants. (See previous elassoma gilberti thread, where duckweed completely covering the surface killed the 10 gallon tank full of fry, and listen to my anecdotal tale of my honeymoon, where ricciocarpus natans covering my 55 gallon guppy tank suffocated 40 fish). No duckweed or ricciocarpus natans in this 10 gallon fry tank.

Next time you try establishing a blackworm population, before you add any fishes, perhaps you could try adding only a few worms that you isolated into some clean aquarium water under a lamp or something to lesson chances of pest introduction. Ideally they would multiply from there and populate the tank. I can't say I've tried this with actual blackworms but I once collected a plethora of mud inverts from a nearby pond, and picked out several which were clearly non insect larvae worms and introduced them to a tank with dirt under gravel substrate. They populated and the fish enjoyed picking at them when they poked out of the gravel. They closely resembled blackworms, so they were probably tubifex or some related species. I'll bet that could work for your tank(s) the same way with blackworms.

Update: I went out and bought a 10 gallon heater. I am going to install it and replant the 10 gallon with rotala wallichii. The temperature will be set to a constant 75 degrees Fahrenheit.

Orangespotted: It's difficult but probably could be done. I've tried separating the leeches and worms and could never separate them completely. Maybe if you were content with starting out with only five worms, it might be done. I was always working with ounces or pound weights of worms. The more mass, the harder it is to get 100% purity.

True. I suppose it really depends on how long you want to wait for the population to multiply before adding fishes.

Rotala wallichii is cool stuff I hope you post a picture once it's thriving!

Current picture of the tank:

http://gallery.nanfa...9 2013.jpg.html

I put two L144 plecos in there 'cause I added a breeding colony of them to the tank below, and discovered that they eat lots of annoying algae and seem to leave fry alone. They ate the cyanobacteria in there, which is weird to me because have you ever smelled that stuff? Whew.
The shells are in there because there was a snail-pocalypse, which in my DH 0 tap water tank means a pH swing happened. I forgot to carbonate buffer the water, so who knows how low it went. Shells are in now, though, so it shouldn't happen again.

The heater on the left is nonfunctional. The heater on the right is and keeps the water at 70 F. The plants weren't doing so well with it colder than that.

I have confirmed that there are both male and female elassoma gilberti in the tank (blue side stripes = male) and one male is starting to color up and has claimed the area on the bottom right of the left-most sword I'm watching him to see if he spawn-dances, but so far he's just black and blue and staking out space.

Blackworm Leeches: I looked at some leeches from my latest batch of blackworms with a dissecting scope. These came from Eastern Aquatics in PA, but i think his original brood stock came from CA Aquatic Foods; anyway the leeches look the same. Small head sucker, small mouth, flat body, 1 pair of eyespots, and then picture-IDing leads me to Helobdella or maybe Glossiphonia (although Thorp & Covitch key says Glossi shoud have 3 prs of eyes). I haven't looked at any internal features to really get a good ID.

Thank you for ID-ing them, Gerald. Mine are all dead from the salt, so I don't have any left for ID purposes. I looked at some Helobdella pictures and agree that that could be them. Striped, carrying their babies on their bellies. Yup. Yuck.

They're finally getting used to me and not fleeing the moment I walk up to the tank. They seem to really like the pellia. Here are photos of a female hanging out in it.


http://gallery.nanfa...m side.jpg.html


http://gallery.nanfa...esize .jpg.html


http://gallery.nanfa...female.jpg.html


http://gallery.nanfa...resize.jpg.html

Dead fish this morning, no idea why. *sighs* This is not unusual. These fish don't really get disease symptoms. They look perfectly healthy, except for being dead. It was one of the males. I'm going to have to count and make sure I've still got both genders now.