What were they? Black critters in water bucket

[RedMare01]

I have no clue and I’m kind of squicked out. :eek: :lol:

BO and hubby went on an out of town trail ride with two of their horses for a few days. I’m the only boarder, and my mare was left turned out with their two ponies. They all had access to a run in, and BO paid someone to come check on them. She’s normally stalled in the heat of the day, so I went out a few times to check on her. Decided to ride, and while killing time letting her cool out, happened to look at the water buckets in her stall.

:eek:

One of them had little black things swimming in it. They looked like tiny black threads, about a quarter of an inch in length, and they wiggled around, sort of like a worm. There were lots of them swimming around in there.

At first I thought mosquito larvae, but these were definitely swimming all through the bucket and not hanging at the top as I’ve seen mosquito larvae pictured.

I don’t think she drank any, because she was out. The buckets probably hadn’t been dumped in at least three days, since BO was out of town. I dumped and scrubbed both buckets and re-hung them.

So…what were they?

[Laurierace]

Tadpoles?

[ReSomething]

Mosquito larvae. They come up to the surface to breathe and then inchworm their way around back down. I guess knowing what they are is an indictment of my farming practices but even I don’t have them in water buckets.

[RedMare01]

Not tadpoles. :lol:

I know what those look like, and these things were way smaller. But, you did give me a good visual trying to figure out how a frog could hop up the wall to get to her bucket, deposit eggs into the bucket, and then get back down.

I still don’t think they were mosquito larvae. I even looked up You Tube videos…the black swimmies in the bucket were smaller than those, really probably not more than 1/4 inch, solid black, didn’t have the big head looking thingy, and the motion is wrong. Picture a worm squiggling though water smoothly, not the jerky up/down motion of teh baby mosquito. :dead:

[Laurierace]

Mosquito larvae was my first guess but I thought she said that wasn’t what they were?

[ReSomething]

Gee. We actually have a colony of frogs that try valiantly to lay eggs in our swimming pool and have actually succeeded on the pool cover “pond” a couple of years running. But tiny tiny swimmers - I’d think they had to be a gnat or midge larva. I’ll be off hunting Youtube also!

[FairWeather]

Mosquitoes. They only lay in standing water, so the water hadn’t been changed in a while. Dump and start over

[Hippolyta]

it could be midge larvae or a ton of other insect/insect like larvae. No harm to horse from the larvae, really. The issue is that they grow up.

[Diamondindykin]

I have the same thing this year in my bucket I am using for my donkey’s. I have a large 100 gallon rubbermaid tank for the horses and it is fine. I have one of those muck buckets for the donkey’s and they have little tadpole looking critters in it. They only take a day or so to appear after I dump and clean the bucket. Mine definelty look like mini-tadpoles but where would they have come from?

[RedMare01]

I You Tubed gnat and midge larvae, and negative on both of those. Not either one. Probably not a big deal since I’m 99% sure she didn’t ingest them, but I’m curious about what they were.

Diamondindykin, glad I’m not the only one (I think…). You have squicky ickies too! :lol: :dead:

[D_Taylor]

You might want to google “trematode cercaria”. These are the swimming larvae associated with PHF.

They can be confused at a glance for skeeter larvea, but do not wiggle the same and have a tadpole like head.

But it would seem like it would take a snail getting into the bucket for them to be there tho. BuT if they are the ones that were in the bucket and it was my horse/pony… then I think would want to know about it so I could be on the lookout for fevers and such.

[Diamondindykin]

@RedMare01;6516989

I You Tubed gnat and midge larvae, and negative on both of those. Not either one. Probably not a big deal since I’m 99% sure she didn’t ingest them, but I’m curious about what they were.

Diamondindykin, glad I’m not the only one (I think…). You have squicky ickies too! :lol: :dead:

YIKES…there are so many in my tank that there is no way they haven’t injested any:eek: :eek: I have been dumping it daily but they reappear the next day. I think that I am going to bleach the bucket tomorrow to see if that will kill whatever it is. My 3 month old baby donkey and his mother are drinking from that tank but they seem fine so far…

[RedMare01]

It’s probably not a big deal, things like that just give me the heebie jeebies.

[AliCat518]

I know just what youre talking about, and I think its no big deal.

I check and clean troughs every week, buckets more often, but I always find these little bugs in there. Weve never had a problem. I chuck out buckets daily, but only scrub troughs every week ish. Its never been a problem!

[StrandedPB]

This is really old and has probably been resolved, but for anyone new the black worm like things are probably horse hair worms. Harmless for the animal drinking the water, but they are parasites that control insects into drowning themselves into bodies of water so that the “worms” can mate.