# Fish that eat detritus worms??



## Quint (Mar 24, 2019)

Your galaxy rasboras Im sure will enjoy a vast majority of them.


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## Ddrizzle (Jan 30, 2019)

Scarlet badis hang out near the bottom and eat that sized food. They literally just stare at the substrate sometimes.

My chocolate Gouramis will also take a peek down there every once in a while.

I'll go ahead and guess that you dont want the worms and I'll tell you that I only had them in my first tank when I was a noobie, and the tank was ridiculously dirty without me knowing it at the time. 

Vac the substrate like crazy with a few extra water changes this week and buy one amano shrimp per gallon of water in your tank imo. Make sure to check your TDS with a meter to start getting a feel of your tanks cleanliness.


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## Blue Ridge Reef (Feb 10, 2008)

I think the term detritus worm gets labeled to a lot of different worms that we come across in the aquarium. Are these the free-swimming annelids that wriggle throughout the water column after a water change? If so, pretty much any small fish without a sucker mouth eats them.


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## ahem (Dec 27, 2014)

If they are worms only in the substrate I have those as well. I think fish are unlikely to eat them as I’ve never seen them stray into the water column. What does get rid of them, or at least reduces numbers very significantly is vacuuming the substrate. All the way down. It not only cleaned out all the worM food, it sucked many worms out to where when I vac clean now I may or may not even see a single one.

Then make sure you are not overfeeding. Less/no food on the bottom will starve them out out of existence.

Be careful if you have never gravel vacuumed. It can kick up noxious stuff and you risk too quick of an abrupt change to the aquarium biota balance. Maybe do half a tank, let it go a few days then do the other half if that is your case.

The worms are creepy, they can grasp surfaces like a leach making hard to rinse them out of the bucket. Hot water in my bucket dislodges and kills them.


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## nicepoeci (Sep 23, 2020)

I will let a few 10 gallon tanks with shrimp only get crazy loaded with daphnia, snails, and detritus worms and other things im not even sure what they are and then drop a couple female guppies / endlers and a male in them and the fry will eat everything but the shrimp. Ill take them out and repeat- so im quite sure guppies and endlers - especially curious growing fry eat them.


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## Jane of Upton (Apr 2, 2006)

I've only had substrate-living worm like things in a soil based substrate tank when in startup mode. Sort of like an initial diatom bloom, they have not lasted (at least not for me). 

If you really want to have the worms actively hunted out of existence, dwarf FW crayfish (C. texanus, C. schultzii, etc.) are extremely amusing to watch while they accomplish this. They will creep along the bottom, antennae out "pinging" the area in front of them. If there is a bit of a worm peeping out, they will snatch it, lightning-fast, and pull it out. Sometimes the worm is pretty long, and they'll have to use both claws, hand-over-hand style. I've actually tried to get some little red worms (live food from LFS, smaller than black worms or tubifex) going in the dwarf cray tank, just because I get such a kick out of watching them patrol around, then Wham! snag a worm. Yeah .... cheap thrills. 

If you have "worms" which stick to the sides of your bucket after water changes, there is a high likelihood that these are planaria. They are more of a pest (I'm convinced they will snack on baby shrimp given the opportunity) and are a symptom of overfeeding.


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## Griznatch (Nov 9, 2020)

If they are not planaria, but detrius worms.. baby guppies will hunt them down systematically, they are quite voracious.


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