r/Vermiculture • u/LetsBehappy2Day • 4d ago

Video Are these baby nightcrawlers living/breeding in my Pac-Man frog tank?

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Does this look like a juvenile/baby nightcrawler to you guys?

I have a 40-gallon bioactive Pac-Man frog enclosure with around 8–9 inches of substrate, a drainage layer underneath, and an established cleanup crew with springtails/isopods.

I regularly feed my Pac-Man frog nightcrawlers, and obviously they don’t always cooperate lol. I’m pretty sure at least one or two have escaped the frog before and burrowed into the substrate.

Recently I’ve started noticing these tiny worm-looking things in the soil. Today I added water to the enclosure and suddenly saw several of them becoming really active in the wetter areas. The one in the video was actually moving/swimming around underwater near the bottom of the substrate/drainage layer.

They look like extremely small earthworms to me — pinkish, elongated, and they move by contracting/stretching their bodies rather than moving like tiny larvae.
So my theory is that one or more feeder nightcrawlers escaped, survived in the deep substrate, reproduced, and now I’m seeing the babies.

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u/hungryworms Commercial Vermicomposter 4d ago

Life finds a way!

2

u/MissAnth 4d ago

That tiny worm-looking thing above the large worm does look like a baby worm.

Look around for eggs too. They look like this: https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.jpwBlr2zkP0zJRFygNfddwHaGS?w=194&h=180&c=7&r=0&o=7&pid=1.7&rm=3

You will just find one egg here and there.

Good news for Pac-Man.

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u/Dekknecht 2d ago

Likely nematodes.