Worms in tank

I was doing a water change on my 30 gal hospital and discovered several small worms living in the gravel. I know this has been discussed before but can not remember if it was a concern or not. These things are about a inch and a half long and very skinny like maybe one quarter to one half of a sewing pin diamenter and light brown color. First question is should I be concerned and second what are my options?? Water parameters are good and tank occupants are 1 Guppy and one Beta. Algae is pretty abundant but coming back under control using mechanical removal and water changes.

TIA !!

WF

Small white worms generally fall into the harmless 'nuisance' class of nemotodia, but 1-1/2' long is a bit big to generalize, so you might need to do some more research, ie:

WF

Planaria worms, or simular.

The worms are harmless, but the cause is not. They are due to overfeeding and/or not enough, or good enough, gravel vacs when doing water changes.

Get one dwarf cory catfish per 5 gals., feed less more often, do at least 20% water changes with good gravel vacs once a week......

What size tank is it? filter?

Depending on tank size, there are a few different species of fish that eat algaes. Some so called 'algae eaters' only eat one or two types of algae. A fish called Ameca Splendens (Butterfly Goodeid) is really hard to find, but about the best all around algae eater I know of. They are livebearers and look something like a plattie. Red Ramshorns snails might be something you might want to look into. They eat uneaten foods in the gravel and algaes as

A betta, guppy, and a few mollies - room for quite a few more. Next group of fish I would get is a few clean-up fish - bottom feeders.

Without weekly maintenance, your canister filter is doing your tank more harm than good. Like most filters, it doesn't remove inorganic pollutants, DOCs (dissolved organic compounds) which is the uneaten foods and the fish's waste. Because of it's high flow rate, canisters do a great job at picking up solid waste, but also because of it's high flow rate, dissolves these solids and pumps them right back into the tank as dissolved pollutants. This is the cause of your excessive algae growth (because of this endless supply of plant nutrients, DOCs).

Removing the traped waste from the gravel with a gravel vac will remove far more DOCs. Even using a gravel vac to remove 20% of the water for a water change still leaves about 30 days of accumulated DOC pollutants in the tank. Sence you don't like to do the deep gravel vacs, get a bunch of live plants .If you don't have at least 2 watts of light per gal., get low light plants. I would also look into outfitting your canister filter with an add-on bio-wheel or two.............. Frank