Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

So I had an entire description all typed out and something happens and I lost it.My name is James and im a Manager at a foster home here in Jay Florida.We have built this system with the help of an aquaponics friend i met, so that we could grow vegetablea for the kids here.Sorry in advanced if I've posted this wrong, I'm new and I've got an issue with my 1000 gallon Tilapia setup.
Today after taking my PH, Nitrite, and Ammonia levels, I found a dead fish floating in the main tank with 20 or more small brown worms attached and eating it.These are not blood worms at all, they are the diameter of pencil lead and when I scooped the fingerling out, they scattered like vampires from the sun.Now the past two days I have not been able to find and fish in my tank even with running my net along the bottom.The tank is Soo large and dark it's hard to tell how many are still alive, but as of right now I cannot find any.My question is what are these worms, and could they be the reason all the fish have disappeared? Thank you Soo much.

Welcome to the forum. Sorry to hear about the fish problem. It's pretty unusual for the fish to disappear unless they are eaten by a bird or other predator. I would think that worms would leave some part of the fish behind in the tank. I would be concerned about the worms and want to find out what they are but I suspect that the fish are still there somewhere in your system. FYI - Sometimes if the fish are small they can get into the pipes and wind up in other parts of the AP system.

Perhaps drop the water level in the tank a bit so you can see easier? I have had storks take fish in a system in the past.

We have a large Styrofoam sheet over the main tank and we have only found a few fingerlings that got sucked through and ended up in the grow beds, I honestly think the works are to blame I've just never seen a work like this that attacks fish and googling their description brings back nothing other than cooking tilapia good to kill parasites.

Worms*

It's fairly common for fish to have parasitic worms and for there to be non parasitic worms in a tank. It could be that these were just feeding off an already dead fish which is something that non parasitic worms would normally do. Exposure to light would make them detach. You could setup a worm trap to see if you can catch some, otherwise, if you have a good memory for their size and how the worms looked see if you can pull up something similar online.