Most likely it's planaria. I'm not sure how it gets in, but it usually multiplies quickly when there's uneaten food for them to feed on. Usually plagues fish tanks that use raw food like market prawns, beef hert, etc.
Not harmful to fishes or plants as far as I know.
Salt is one treatment, but not possible for a planted tank. Meds are also unsuitable if it's a planted tank.
I had a breakout sometime back in my planted arowana tank after I started leaving a piece of market prawn for the SAEs after feeding the arowana. Stopping the habit did nothing to dent the planria population. I tried picking them out with tweezers, but that's not effective. In the end, I introduced some tiger barbs for some other reason and the planaria dissappeared practically overnight.
I'm not sure if the barbs ate them. From what I've read:
- No fish will eat it.
- Fish seldom touch food that planaria has crawled over.
The barbs could have been hungry enough to stomach them as I do not specifically feed them at all.
One possibility is that the barbs effectively removed their food source by picking up all the scraps from the arowana's meal.
One way of removing them is to tie a piece of meat to a string and leave it in the tank... after some time, you should find them infesting it. Remove them by lifting out the meat.
Search the web for more info and also how to remove them.
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