triangle head mini leach thing ID assistance

I have all sorts of interesting things appearing in my tanks! Haven't seen one of those hydras in months, but now my tank is infested with these guys. They're eating the leftover flake food, which is great. Should I be worried that they'll eat young fish or become parasitic or something?

Looks like some kind of planarian...

Dude! Those don't look like native fish in that tank. I'l bet a nice Cyprinella would eat those up!

No idea, but they look awesome!

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.

Heck, some people would say that planarians are a sign of overfeeding a tank... but if you are raising baby platys and planarians... and can feed both to your natives... sounds like a deal to me... maybe some of the more biologically educated can tell us if feeding the planarians has any downside?

Planaria! I love them. I've been telling my club members for months if they see any in their tanks, share with me. Last month a member, Adam, brought me a jar full of them and just an hour or so ago I saw a planaria for the first time chugging along on the glass in the back corner my 55 gallon tank, having survived transfer. What fun, neat little creatures. Look closely and you can see something that looks like adorable little eyes. Here, I'll try to find a picture.


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

I would happily take the little guys off of your hands!

Planaria = bad conditions.

Planaria CAN eat fish eggs and maybe newborn wrigglers that cant swim yet. I dont think they indicate "bad conditions" any more than a growing population of snails does. They do suggest there's more food going in than the platies can eat. Your coarse gravel may be a factor. Planaria have access to food that sinks into the gravel where the platies can't get it.

BTW: $9 for 30 planaria at Carolina Biol Supply

Planaria CAN eat fish eggs and maybe newborn wrigglers that cant swim yet.

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.

Do they eat snails? That'd be cool. That tank has like a thousand ramshorn and 500 malaysian trumpets.

$9 for 30 planaria at Carolina Biol Supply

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
...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?

No I don't think they eat snails ... possibly snail eggs if they're not in a tough capsule.
Basic biology & culture methods for protozoa, planaria, crustacea, other inverts:
http://www.carolina....vert-Manual.pdf

Basic biology & culture methods for protozoa, planaria, crustacea, other inverts:
http://www.carolina....vert-Manual.pdf

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten they can transfer memories from one to another. What a neat creature.

I haven't seen any platy fry. It's been several weeks since I bought them, and as far as I can tell I'm keeping them happy. 2 males and 4 females. Those planaria had be worried, hence the thread. However, I'd rather not derail the thread by getting into platy issues.

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.

It's interesting that you haven't seen any fry, though. With four females and a gestation time of 3-5 weeks (temperature matters), you should have seen some by now.
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.

personally, i love planaria. to me, they are really neat little critters.

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.

I just put about 20 planaria into a tank of Least Killies. I still see a ton of babies, if not more. I think the big females have been snacking on them which has actually caused a greater number of babies. In the end, I'd say they are not a terribly big threat, maybe even a beneficial aspect of the aquarium.

Well, if they have enough to eat, they'll take over the tank, and things can really get out of hand.
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.

Cool, thanks for sharing. Those are interesting facts!

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.

Ah, the high temperature might explain why I haven't seen any in my tanks since seeing that first one. Or my fish might have eaten them. Poor little shell less snails.