AH! HELP! please.

[partypalooza5]

Ok. I originally was excited that my fire mouths had some babies. They were almost free swimming it seems. Anyway, I came home tonight and they were all gone. nowhere to be found. I'm guessing the frogs ate them..

NOW both the cichlids are spazzing out and have faint coloring.
I looked at the water and i noticed something swimming in the water. There are like mini-worms!! are they bad? i tried to get a picture but they are so small. they are about a half inch long and swim around in the open water. I'm not sure if its making them sick or something O_O.

Any ideas?

 

[thatmagicguy]

The worms are not responsible for your fry going missing. Did you say FROGS??? Frogs will eat anything they can shovel in their mouths. And if you turn the lights off then it's dinner time. The parents could be discolored for a number of reasons. There could have been a skirmish after the fry disappeared, this is common in cichlid pairs. Or there could be something wrong with the water quality, perhaps a rise in ammonia or nitrites. What the tank needs is to be stabilized. You need to check the ammonia, nitrite, and take measures to correct that. I cannot personally accept frogs in a cichlid breeding tank, that's up to you.

The worms, these are little flat worms that are common in aquaria. They proliferate when there is alot of food for them. Cichlid tanks are good for them. They are for the most part harmless but if they are sticking to the side of the fish they can irritate them. There is no way to rid an aquarium of them without completely sterilizing everything and starting over. There are copper treatments that will rid them. But will affect anything else that is vulnerable to copper, like frogs.

I personally have advised people in the past with these worms to cut back on feedings for awhile, do frequent small partial water changes, vacuum(which I'm not a big fan of except in tanks where the occupants make big waste like cichlids), and the worm numbers will diminish. The good news is that when they explode in numbers due to excessive food for them the population will subsequently crash as well once the food source diminishes. In real dirty tanks this may never happen.

One thing I should point out, these worms will leave the gravel bed and migrate to the surface of the water in the face of bad water quality, eg, high ammonia or nitrites. Going back to what I originally said, check your water parameters and stabilize your tank.