triangle head mini leach thing ID assistance
#1 Guest_BenCantrell_*
Posted 19 February 2014 - 08:37 PM
#2
Posted 19 February 2014 - 08:39 PM
#3
Posted 19 February 2014 - 08:50 PM
#4 Guest_gzeiger_*
Posted 19 February 2014 - 08:51 PM
#5 Guest_BenCantrell_*
Posted 19 February 2014 - 08:54 PM
Dude! Those don't look like native fish in that tank. I'l bet a nice Cyprinella would eat those up!
For shame... they're platies. I wanted a steady supply of feeder fish for my community tank. I had limited success with mosquitofish because the males wouldn't leave the females alone. These platies are actually the first fish I've ever paid money for.
I've been throwing some of those planarians in the native tank and they get eaten as soon as they hit the water.
#6
Posted 19 February 2014 - 09:04 PM
#7 Guest_Erica Lyons_*
Posted 19 February 2014 - 10:48 PM
http://raven.islandw...s/Planaria.html
Is that not adorable?
Freshman year of high school they had us cut them in half and watch them grow back. The planaria didn't like it, though. Hmm. Well, I'm not cutting them in half now. They will live happily in my planted tank They're so cute. Also, as you've found, delicious to many kinds of fish. Gotta love live foods that breed themselves with no effort on your part.
Edit:
Oh, by the way, please don't call the poor little planaria a leech. They're very different creatures. I strongly, strongly dislike leeches. Leeches aren't tasty to my fish, they eat my blackworms and my fish eggs, then when leeches run out of blackworms they attack my fish. Stupid leeches, they are nothing like planaria. Let me show you the difference with some videos from my tanks.
Here is a video of leeches adhering to my betta, the 'canary in the coal mine' indicator fish for my elassoma tank: youtube.com/watch?v=2iX9WXM3U0U
Leech eats blackworm: youtube.com/watch?v=TewMm9LaLc8
Note the lack of an adorable spade shaped head, the presence of a butt-end sucker pad, and the wiggling motion. Leech movement is that they attach their butt and quest with their heads. Planaria, on the other hand, sort of glide.
Leech feeling stressed out moves sideways: youtube.com/watch?v=LbAAlJkBVEM
Here is a video of a leech questing, scared, hungry: youtube.com/watch?v=Jq1TKN4birQ
Easy to see motion in this video of a land leech, not my own video: youtube.com/watch?v=ye4N2ZeJESA
#8 Guest_Yeahson421_*
Posted 19 February 2014 - 11:40 PM
#9 Guest_Irate Mormon_*
Posted 20 February 2014 - 12:25 AM
#10 Guest_gerald_*
Posted 20 February 2014 - 10:43 AM
BTW: $9 for 30 planaria at Carolina Biol Supply
#11 Guest_Erica Lyons_*
Posted 20 February 2014 - 10:59 AM
Really? Interesting. They're in the guppy and heterandria formosa tank where the babies are huge,so I figured they couldn't do any damage there. But yeah, there was never any plan to introduce them to the elassoma tanks; there is no room for variables there.Planaria CAN eat fish eggs and maybe newborn wrigglers that cant swim yet.
Do they eat snails? That'd be cool. That tank has like a thousand ramshorn and 500 malaysian trumpets.
lol there are planaria vendors. I didn't have any plans to breed the planaria for selling, but now I'm wondering what they'd fetch me on aquabid ha ha ha$9 for 30 planaria at Carolina Biol Supply
...especially if they eat the ugly snails. 1000 is too many, I can't see through the glass.
Ben, have you seen a decrease in platy fry production since introducing the planaria? Is there any chance they could eat livebearer fry?
#12 Guest_gerald_*
Posted 20 February 2014 - 11:11 AM
Basic biology & culture methods for protozoa, planaria, crustacea, other inverts:
http://www.carolina....vert-Manual.pdf
#13 Guest_Erica Lyons_*
Posted 20 February 2014 - 11:20 AM
Oh yeah, I'd forgotten they can transfer memories from one to another. What a neat creature.Basic biology & culture methods for protozoa, planaria, crustacea, other inverts:
http://www.carolina....vert-Manual.pdf
#14 Guest_BenCantrell_*
Posted 20 February 2014 - 11:51 AM
Sometimes groups of planaria look like they're trying to eat snail eggs. I'm not sure if they're succeeding. They definitely eat flakes, that's for sure. You can see whatever color flakes the eat through their translucent bodies.
I really don't feel like the platy tank has bad conditions. The plants are growing, the fish seem happy, and I have a steady supply of snails and worms to throw in my native tank. I'm obviously overfeeding with respect to the fish, but oh well.
#15 Guest_Erica Lyons_*
Posted 20 February 2014 - 11:54 AM
This is relevant to native fish because if they can take down livebearer fry, that makes them WAY more of a threat than I'd thought, and they in the same tank as my gold heterandria formosa. I see a bunch of fry, but there's only a few planaria in there. You've got a lot and see no fry. Hmm.
#16 Guest_Auban_*
Posted 02 March 2014 - 05:15 AM
that said, i have heard a lot of stories of them going after fish eggs and freshwater shrimp... so i treated my shrimp tank for them when they showed up.
if you want to get rid of them, fenbendazol works great.
#17 Guest_Yeahson421_*
Posted 02 March 2014 - 03:40 PM
#18 Guest_Mysteryman_*
Posted 02 April 2014 - 12:15 AM
By "enough to eat," I mean there's too much food left over from feeding the fish. A growing planarian population is a sure sign of overfeeding.
That said, I love these little guys. The way the glide over surfaces like tiny little hovercraft is just really cool. Pay attention and you'l see what I mean-- they don't crawl like most worms.
They will eat eggs and will attack any open sores on a fish, but are otherwise "mostly harmless."
The best things about them, though, are the things that might appeal most to your inner mad scientist.
If you chop them up, the pieces will regenerate into new worms.
If you only partially split them lengthwise, you'll have 2-headed or 2 tailed worms. This can be repeated a few times, and you can eventually wind up witha freaky little critter with 16 heads and 16 tails.
It gets weirder.
These things can LEARN! Yes, learn, as in, they can be taught tricks or even how to run a maze!
But that's not all... oh, no...
if you take a "learned" worm that is well trained and chop it up into tiny pieces, and then feed those pieces to untrained worms, the worms that ate the pieces will know the trick!
I know. That sounds crazy. It's true, though. They keep their memories in their nerves, since they don't have brains, and are able to somehow assimilate the stored memories of ingested neurons into their own.
Personally, it seems to me that we could spend a few generations training a line of flatworms and passing their skills down to their progeny in this way until eventually we had some freakishly smart super-worms.
Why?
Because it would be cool, of course, and , uhm.... SCIENCE!!!
By the way, Bruce, congrats to you and to UAH for being named the best college in Alabama, money's-worth wise.
#19 Guest_BenCantrell_*
Posted 02 April 2014 - 07:55 AM
An update for the tank - I added a heater a while back, and at 78 degrees the panaria population dropped significantly, and the hornwort grows so fast that I have to trim it every 3 to 4 days. It basically looks like a 10 gallon block of green. I'm getting tons of fry; I'd guess that their survival rate is close to 100%. There also seems to be a larger snail population now.
#20 Guest_Erica Lyons_*
Posted 02 April 2014 - 08:17 AM
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