What kind of worm?

[mrbacony]

I have several of these worms attached to the glass and some free floating. Any idea what they are?

 

[WisReef]

spaghetti worm

 

[Goaway]

The fact they are free floating and all over the glass.

Do you have a sand bed? How clean is it? It's odd for spaghetti worms to be out of sand. Unless they are looking for food.

 

[JGT]

Agree. I suspect no sand bed as normally they encase their bodies in the sand to form tubes and just the tentacles extend outward.

 

[mrbacony]

I do have a sand bed. It’s about 2 inches. I siphon it out about every other water change. Not the cleanest though.

 

[bnord]

strange they are not embedded, was this after a sand cleaning?

How is the tank otherwise?

 

[mrbacony]

Not after a cleaning. My nitrates are high. I am working on reducing those. Otherwise, everything seems happy

 

[A Young Reefer]

some sort of fringed worm (Cirratulidae )is my closest guess.

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[mrbacony]

strange they are not embedded, was this after a sand cleaning?

How is the tank otherwise?

Interesting that you asked if it was after a sand cleaning. I did a water change today and cleaned the sand. There are TONS of these things all in the sand. So I guess what I am seeing has been after a sand cleaning.
I always thought that it was uneaten food in the sand bed. I have been seeing them for quite a while during sand bed cleanings.

Do I need to be worried with the amount I am finding? Should I be getting a natural predator? The curious thing is they look very dead during the sand cleaning, but they just might not be an animated worm.

 

[vetteguy53081]

The pinkish one is a cirratulids which feeds on deposits off the bottom using their their palps and often confused with spaghetti worms which are terrbilladae worms with a tube. Cirratulids are sluggish and either bury themselves below the surface of bottom leaving only their gills and palps visible. Some are free-living as in the one you have and burrow through corals, shell or rocks.
The little ones all over the glass and free swimming are epitokes

 

[vetteguy53081]

spaghetti worm

Not spaghetti- no tubes or stringers

 

[EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal]

Interesting that you asked if it was after a sand cleaning. I did a water change today and cleaned the sand. There are TONS of these things all in the sand. So I guess what I am seeing has been after a sand cleaning.
I always thought that it was uneaten food in the sand bed. I have been seeing them for quite a while during sand bed cleanings.

Do I need to be worried with the amount I am finding? Should I be getting a natural predator? The curious thing is they look very dead during the sand cleaning, but they just might not be an animated worm.

These are hair worms (cirratulid polychaetes). Like bristleworms, their population will increase with overfeeding, etc. You said you have high nitrates, so it's possible that there is extra organic material (food, dead critters, etc) in the system. There's really no harm in having a lot of hair worms (or bristles, for that matter) as they are part of your cuc. Personally, I don't have very many nassarius snails right now (reefcleaners sent me whelks instead and they killed my nassariuses...) and my sandbed has a lot of hair worms that do a similar job (not the same since they don't airate the sandbed, but they keep the surface of the sandbed clean).
I agree that if they are on the glass a lot, they are likely hungry. This is not a bad thing either if you are reducing feeding, etc, to bring down nutrients.

 

[EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal]

The curious thing is they look very dead during the sand cleaning, but they just might not be an animated worm.

They generally aren't going to move much if disturbed. But after you feed your tank, do you see little brown/red tentacles coming out of the sand and/or rocks? That's them
Here's a large one I pulled from my tank a while back... He started to open back up when I put some food in the container.