There's actually nothing really horrible about them, but they can bother small shrimp and snails and might eat fish/snail eggs. There seems to be several different colours in the common ones found in aquariums, transparent, white, brown and red. If you split it, it will regenerate and you will end up having 2 planaria.
Crossed-eyed grossness, just pure yucky! The only small creature I dislike (I get shivers down my spine even thinking about them). These ones are harmless, but as with any other "pest", if there's too many of them, you are either overfeedingor just not keeping the tank clean enough of debris, decaying plant matter. You can find them from the substrate and they are the ones that might appear from the filter when you turn it on.
If disturbed, they will swim around wriggling briskly. Nematodes are small, thin, white/transparent free-living roundworms and the "swim" moving themselves in a wave like pattern (well, forming an S shape). Only a few Tubifex in the substrate isn't anything to worry about though. If there's lots of them, the substrate is too dirty and might be good idea to do something about it. If disturbed and dig up, they will form a ball, if left alone, they will gather pieces of sand/gravel around their body forming a sort of tube where they live in and they'll stick their head out of the substrate looking like red hairgrass. Red, yummy worms (used as fish foodtoo) which live inside the substrate. They are singular, white, hard, round or oval shaped and about 1 - 2 mm in diameter. Something that looks a bit similar are Nerite eggs. They are small and can't do much damage to plants, but since they are small, it's impossible to find and remove eggs and the baby snails. Since freshwater limpets, Acroloxus lacustris, are so small and also move really slowly, it might be hard to identify them as snails. Here's a really young CRS baby looking at a seed shrimp. Sometimes they swim in open water looking like drunken bees. surfaces and you can see them walking inside the substrate too. They move in a same fashion as Copepods, eating all kinds of nice things from the glass/plant/etc. They are usually a bit bigger than Copepods. Seed shrimp are tiny seed shaped crustaceans. I call them fat, sad reindeers (well, they look like it ). They are completely harmless and really interesting creatures. They are tiny crustaceans and are easily recognized of their jerkyvertical "swimming". Water fleas are usually used as fish food. Harmless, cute, there's lots of different coloured species. They usually move around the tank glass and other surfaces, usually with one short leap at a time. Here's some of the most common tiny creatures found from the aquariums.Ĭopepods are small and funny looking one eyed crustaceans. Are they harm or harmless for your shrimps, fish and plants? Thanks to Rain- (a member on The Planted Tank forum) for explaining these bugs in this article You realize that you never brought them in and ask how can they get in the tank. They are moving on glass, creeping around, swimming all over the tank. One day you just stare at your aquarium or shrimp tank and see some different creatures appear from nowhere.