Me and Tubifex, BFF
I know that I’m supposed to be doing dirt, but the stork brought a special delivery my way today!
That’s not entirely accurate. The stork must have brought this delivery some time ago. Still, o happy day! I’ve got some new friends, and their name is Tubifex tubifex!
While cleaning the baby snail tank, I noticed some stringy things floating. Suspicious, since baby snails shouldn’t be making such things, I scooped one out into a bucket and took a better look. It was moving. Alive-like moving - stretching, reaching, coiling. I waited for the water to settle, but the string thing kept at it and my suspicions were confirmed - a worm!
Here’s some video.
Meet the tubifex worm, a/k/a sludge worm, from the phylum Annelida (another link here). Annelids are the segmented worms, and include earthworms and leeches.
Tubifex worms are found in sediments in lakes and rivers throughout the world. They can go quite a long time without food or oxygen, and can survive in polluted environments where other animals cannot.
How did this worm get into my baby snail tank? Stork deliveries aside, the worms must have come from the algae wafers that I feed the baby snails. Tubifex worms are often an ingredient in fish food, even in some algae wafers. They can form cysts to protect themselves from drying out and then, when conditions are right, spring forth into, say, my baby snail tank. It’s one way these guys get around.
I was concerned, when I first saw the worm, worrying it might be a parasitic worm that could be harmful to humans or baby snails. But no - we should be just fine, me, the worms, and the baby snails, so long as these worms weren’t hanging around in sewage before encysting and becoming trapped in an algae wafer. Many tubifex worms sold live for aquarium use have come from sewage-contaminated sediment, and therefore carry harmful parasites.
Does anyone have a…microscope I can borrow?
Here’s hoping that my worms are clean.
tubifex, worms, snail, aquarium, parasite
ps - I’ll get to the dirt soon. Promise.
July 12th, 2007 at 3:31 am
When I was hardcore into aquariums in high school I kept masses of tubifex worms in a special plastic worm box which consisted of two pieces - a top tray with a super-fine mesh that even the tiny worms couldn’t fit through and a bigger bottom tray that you filled with water. Ideally the fine mesh would just touch the waterline so that the worms would stay damp but not drown.
I’d buy a bag of worms at the aquarium store, usually a golf ball-sized glob with like a thousand little writhing red worms in a mass and take them to their new home to the tray.
It was a delicate balance between the two trays and whenever I forgot to check the water regularly enough it would evaporate and my glob of shiny red tubifex worms would dehydrate into brown worm jerky. Also, you had to rinse them off regularly to clear out the dead ones and the worm shit.
And yes, a glob of sewer worms smells pretty much what you would expect it to, even when they’re not living in sewage.
In retrospect, it was a lot of work just to feed my fish. But I was *really* into fish.
Random memory - I had a black angel fish the size of a CD jewelcase that I’d trained to jump out of the water like a killer whale and grab a glob of worms from your hand. It never failed to impress people.