Yuck!! It sounds like a round worm! Don't touch it until we know. Sandy

Here is a link that might be useful: Horsehair worm

Well, the references say it is not harmful to humans. I am not totally convinced. I remember seeing one when I was a kid. Someone brought it into Science class. The teacher put it into a bottle of alcohol to preserve it but first he had all of us handle it with rubber gloves on. I remember it seemed very strong and stiff and it kind of resisted then it wrapped itself around my finger. It was a cream color that changed to tan as it dried out.
I found it very unpleasant but I have a thing about parasites.
I hated that teacher. He seemed really creepy but he knew my parents so I had to be extra polite. Every year he killed two goldfish in front of his freshman class by dropping a cigarette into the water. He reminded me of Hitler. Sandy

Here is a link that might be useful: Is this it?

Thanks Sandy,
That looks like what it is!
That is horrible what your old science teacher did! Don't you wish you could speak out when you're little, like you would now? How did the cigarette kill the fish?
Hopefully he'll get his justice someday. Wait until he finds out that god is a goldfish!
My son had a science teacher who was weird too. They were going to dissect frogs and I sent a note in saying that we didn't do that. I sent in a website link that allows students to do virtual dissections, and learn anatomy, without killing. Well, instead of letting my son do that, he made him stand out in the hall during the dissection. GGGrrrrrrrr.
My son brought a worm into the house when he was little and set it on the table in front of me. It looked like the horsehair worm, but it was doing all sorts of geometric gyrations on the table. Very bizarre! I was on a business call on the phone and it was rather hard to concentrate!! YUK! (my son was a handful!!) haha
Well, I guess I'll live and let live with this worm, but always wear pond gloves when working in the water.
Thanks Sandy.

The gyrations are typical. They don't like it when there is no water they can get to.
The teacher broke up the cigarette and dropped it in the water where the nicotine in the tobacco caused it to become poisonous enough to send the goldfish into convultions. Sandy

What a creep!

Okay, as an animal lover, I find the goldfish thing pretty bad.

BUT!

Knowing that feeder fish are quite literally a dime a dozen (so to speak), and bred to be basically killed by the thousands, it's by no means a horrible loss. What IS a loss is me, as a youth group teacher, and only 22, seeing tons of kids these days barely over 14, who even after being bombarded with images of smoking and how it kills, still light up. They STILL think it can't hurt them. I'm sure the goldfish dieing that way at least scared ONE of those kids, and if that's one more life not wasted away (and one more we as a populous don't have to pay for because they can't afford treatment down the road), then I can't say I'm against it.

Parasites dont like outside a hosts body. Only the eggs do so its not a round worm . Since theres 1000's of species of worms , it could be anything. You didnt say if its living in the water or on the plant. It could just be a tubiflex worm like they sell in pet shops as fish food. Rick

Cath, below is another link about Round worms,[Nematoda] just to make you squirm a bit more.LOL
I think it will probably be a Horsehair worm you have there, as Sandy first suggested.
They are quite common in ponds and are harmless to humans.
Not so it's cousin, the Round worm, discussed in the article below.
"Horton"

Here is a link that might be useful: Round worm

Thanks Horton. Now I'm never going near my lotus bog again!
LOL!
I see it swimming in the water in the bog alot, so I suppose that's good, newbirdman.
My dogs drink water out of these ponds, but they take a heartworm pill each month that kills other worms too, so hopefully they're covered. Maybe I should start taking that pill too? haha
My lotus bog is alot less "clean" than my little pond with just water in it. There is alot of decaying stuff in the bog, from last year's lotus growth. It doesn't smell and the water in it is clearing, so I think its taking care of itself. But it probably grows alot more funky things than a regular pond. (It is a 300 gallon stocktank filled back up with soil and about 7" of water on top of that).
But I definitely will be careful about not sticking my bare hands in it. (and I'll also wear a HAZMET outfit while working near it.) :)

I will forever be grossed out by the horsehair worm but it shocks me to see an expanded discussion of roundworms as nematodes.I knew there were beneficial and not so beneficial nematodes in the soil and I knew there were roundworm eggs in the soil from feces of infected animals and I have seen roundworms being expelled from an infected puppy back when it was not common to treat pets automatically for the parasite. Somehow I never thought of them as related.
Cathy, don't even joke about having the parasite yourself. While it mostly lives in the gut of animals it can migrate through the bloodstream into the lungs, liver, heart and brain where it can kill you if it doesn't make you blind or crazy first. The Feds say that trichinosis is gone so we can eat our pork pink now but I remember the horror stories too well to ever eat it any way but well done. I was taught that it was the basis for the prohibition from eating pork for Jews and Muslims. Most of those dietary laws were there for good reason.
I also remember my parents being very reluctant to allow me to swim in a public pool when they were first becoming popular. They knew parasites could enter through any mucous membrane and the combination of intestinal worms and Polio made the super saturation with chlorine quite popular for hot, sweaty kids. If my swim suit didn't fade drastically and start coming apart then there must not have been enough chlorine to their thinking.
Would you believe that it was once common for women who wanted to be fashionably thin to deliberately infect themselves with roundworms?!? That goes along with the arsenic in the face powder to make them fashionably pale and other horrors of the history of womanly beauty.
Now I have made myself paranoid and I will be wearing latex gloves 24/7. Sandy

All quite true. My grandmother (who was from the roaring 20's) spoke of friends of hers who ate tape worm capsules in order to keep skinny. They end up truly killing the person, as tapeworms can grow to over 20 feet long in the human gut, which use up their blood supply and essentially do just what the lady wanted...starve her...but to death. :(
Nicci

EEEEEEWWWwwwwwwwwwwww.
Sandy......you say they can infect you and make you crazy?
Hmmmm.......maybe I'm already infected??
Just kidding.........but I know its nothing to laugh about.
I, too, can't imagine eating pink pork!
Now I'm going to have nightmares tonight!