Can anyone identify this parasitic worm???

[Alfrareef]

That thing in the middle is just part of the specimen container.

Sorry but I can’t identify the worm. My bad...
Hope you have success saving the fish.

 

[Tft12]

I know you won't agree with me but for what it's worth, here's my suspicions.

The "worm" doesn't look like a worm at all. It looks like a tiny piece of thread. It's even curled and twisted up like thread often does and frayed on the ends.

That was my first consideration but the tail of the worm was definitely writhing initially. Additionally, it degraded overnight. It was certainly a worm.

I agree with you on the generally accepted bacterial cause of popeye but if the fish is healthy and in decent living conditions (the Achilles has been in my system for over 2 years and looks extremely healthy otherwise, but there’s a caveat to this comment below) typically there’s some damage to the eye that starts the popeye off. A parasitic lesion seemed like a reasonable source of initiating damage to the eye or of causing a localized immune response on its own. On a side note, the general explanation of popeye is that it’s due to the fish’s immune response to a bacterial eye infection. I don’t really see a reason why the immune response would have to be limited to being a reaction to bacteria. A parasitic infection in an eye would cause an immune response too...I’m not saying I know for a fact that parasitic infections of a fish eye can cause popeye, I’m saying why not consider it? So many of long held hobby assumptions turn out to be wrong.

To your other points about general health, I agree totally. My fish were well quarantined before being placed in the display and I feed them a lot of high quality food, but this Achilles was in a 180 and I certainly feel this is too small a tank for this fish since he’s grown over the years, so he would likely have been stressed by that. I have a 300 plumbed into the same system that I was moving him to this month (but really he’ll need more than that too) but hadn’t found time to catch him from the reef display. I definitely messed up there.

I appreciate your input. Thanks for commenting.

I started the thread because I wanted to know if anyone could provide a comment along the lines of “that worm looks like it belongs to the group...”. Nematodes do nasty things in nature like destroy human eyes so it really didn’t seem like a stretch to make a connection when a fish lost an eye and then when dipping this particular fish I found a roundworm, so I considered that perhaps the roundworm caused the eye damage. If you’re familiar with Filariasis or Ocular toxocariasis it’s an easy leap to make - but I’m not saying this is certainly the same thing going on, I was only thinking that it was worth considering.