Any idea what this is….

Seen the jelly masses before, think / thought they were pond snail eggs… never seen them look like this before… not sure if that is a parasite worm on the snail eggs… thought at 1st it was a root piece from the lily of the Nile I planted in the tank today, but the picture with the flash, makes it look segmented, not like a root??? BTW… the jelly mass has been there for approximately a week, the wormy looking thing, only for a couple hours

What ever it was is gone 15 minutes later… snail eggs still there…

Cadis fly larvae???… never seen one In here before

Haha do you have shrimp in that tank? The segmented thing looks like a piece of shrimp molt, just one of the legs.

Armano… so maybe….

snail eggs and a worm checking them out

Those are snail eggs. The other thing could be a worm as Colin already thinks. But a shrimp leg as or a scale of a shrimp leg is also possible if I look at the shape of it.

emeraldking said:

Those are snail eggs. The other thing could be a worm as Colin already thinks. But a shrimp leg as or a scale of a shrimp leg is also possible if I look at the shape of it.

Click to expand...

Don't forget that shrimps also shed to grow a new scale. Once that happens a translucent scale of body parts will flow through the tank or goes to the bottom.

There are 20 mature Armano shrimp in this particular tank, so I see sheds all the time… this did not look like part of an Armano shed… I do have one Vampire shrimp that lives under the driftwood behind where I took the picture… it’s a little bigger than the Armani’s so it may be a leg from a shed on the Vampire

Looking at it closer I can tell you with 100% certainty that it is the leg of a shrimp molt. I am extremely familiar with crustacean anatomy and those segments are dead on for the segmented legs of shrimp. If it were a worm, it would A: not be translucent in the particular way chitin is, and B: the segments would be regular, i.e. all of the same size. The segments on this object are of different lengths, thicknesses, etc.

Furthermore, if you look very closely, you can see the tiny little “hairs” on the lower part of the leg. Very classic crustacean.
Here’s a diagram to hopefully illustrate further. Specifically, the part of the molt in your tank is one of the pereiopods, or “walking legs” (as opposed to the pleopods, the “swimmerets”)