Black Worms, Tubifex, Whatever

what about moths?

I've always fed moths to my fish, the little white ones easily caught around the backdoor light anyway. My oscars used to chow the big fat ones. There are probably some that are not good for them to eat so some research into your local moths may be a good idea (I should do it too!)

Kanus, thanks for the info, I'll be sure to check our the Dero worms.

Howdy -- here's something I posted to the old e-mail list back in 2006 on the topic of blackworm culture. Spirulina flakes were the only food I found to work consistently -- but seems there must be something cheaper that you could feed them. If anyone figures something else out, I'd love to hear it.

But... I might have given up on actually culturing these guys. I just contacted my local independent aquarium store, and they can sell me 1/2 lb of blackworms for $17, or 1lb for $31. That's actually better than if I ordered them directly from http://aquaticfoods....Blackworms.html (they quoted me about $35 including shipping for 1lb). I'm thinking I might set them up in a good-sized container with sand bottom, and just concentrate on feeding them to keep them healthy while I use them up over a period of months, rather than trying to grow the culture. We'll see how that works out. Maybe with that large of a colony I'll get a growth rate that's sufficient to harvest sustainably. The issue is that they seem to have a pretty slow growth rate compared to other cultures -- definitely not something that you can start with a small culture and have it balloon exponentially in a matter of weeks.

I've been lobbying to create a new live foods subforum as a place to discuss all aspects of culturing/collecting live foods. There's a lot of info on this forum, but it's scattered all about and not especially easy to find. If you agree, maybe drop a line of support in that topic:
http://forum.nanfa.o...?showtopic=4038

Cheers,
Jase

NANFA-L-- Culturing blackworms -- very late response
Jase Roberts (nanfa_list-in-jaseroberts.net)
Thu, 17 Aug 2006 14:40:54 -0400

Hi,

I mentioned culturing blackworms back in May, but never followed up on a question from Bob Bock...

I got 2 smallish "portions" of blackworms from a local fish store sometime mid-winter. I've been maintaining them ever since. During a period when I was feeding regularly and measuring the growth (by volume), I was getting doubling rates of roughly once per 3-4 weeks.

I have the worms in a under-bed sweater box, with a standard box filter hanging on the side. I've got about 1/2 inch of very clean (rinsed many times) play sand in the bottom. After a couple days, the worms will all be buried into the sand, except when actively feeding.

Total depth of the water is about 3-4 inches (about 5 gallons total). Sometimes I run an airstone, but I bet the filter takes care of aeration just fine. The worms really go for spirulina tablets, and seem to be okay with a soy pasta I've given them (terrible-tasting relic of the "low-carb" craze -- was $0.01/package on clearance at a local bulk food store).

I've gone a month or more at times with no water change, even when actively feeding. When I do change water, I use my fingers to thoroughly turn over the sand and dislodge all the worms, then use my hands to create a whirlpool in the tub. The worms clump on the surface in the center, and I can carefully pour all the water off. I re-fill and repeat this a couple times to clean. Seems to work well, with only a few worms lost in the pouring process.

At first I thought I needed to keep the worms in the dark, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. They feed regardless of light level. There's some cyclical nature to their feeding, but I haven't figure out what.

I've focused only on growth of the colony, with almost no harvesting. You'd need a really big area devoted to it if you were going to use the worms as a staple food. Harvesting would be really simple, using the same "whirlpool" method for cleaning. I can pick up big clumps of pure worms with my fingers, due to the fact that they ball up when disturbed.

It took a couple weeks after getting them from the store for them to really settle down and start eating. When they divide, the "tail" end takes something like a week or more to grow mouthparts. Fresh from the store, it seemed like there was a fair bit of necrosis at the ends, so I'm guessing the mouthparts were in bad shape.

I recently moved, and one of my two cultures died very suddenly as I was setting them up in my new place. All worms were dead and bleached white in the span of an hour. No idea what did them in -- water (chloramine?), some residue on filters, whatever. At least the larger culture made it through with only maybe 1/4 loss after a week in a small container in the fridge (and a few water changes).

Hope this is useful to someone. Again, unless you're going to devote a lot of space, I think you're only going to be able to feed as snacks. Since reproduction is *only* through division, rate is really limited. The huge outdoor ponds that the California raisers use are the way to go for bulk production -- and prices for bulk quantities are pretty reasonable.

-Jase

I actually have blackworms established in my tank. Pretty cool to see them looking like something out of a coral reef, after dark!

Edited by Nightwing, 04 March 2008 - 11:14 PM.

I actually have blackworms established in my tank. Pretty cool to see them looking like something out of a coral reef, after dark!

Excellent. Do you have any sort of a refugium set up for them, or just no fish that will dig them up? I've often found them living in the gravel weeks after the last feeding (heck, they're aquatic), but I'm not sure I can ever claim to have a population in a tank that was actually growing.

These guys seem to me to be a pretty perfect food. I'll post a pic later of how I generally feed them to my fish.

Here's the setup I've often used to feed blackworms and white worms to my fish. Keeps the worms from escaping into the gravel (and dying, in the case of white worms). Also a good way to get the food down to things that mostly eat on the bottom (where a floating worm feeding cone won't work).

Just a semi-rigid polyethylene tube with a wire that hooks over the rim of the tank to hold it in place. It's cut to length so it sicks about 1" out of the water, and feeds down into a small glass bowl (3 for $1 at a dollar store) sitting at the bottom of the tank. The bottom of the tube is cut at an angle so it doesn't seal itself off against the bowl. I use a little eyedropper-like pipette to suck up worms and add them to the top. Ignore the office equipment in the background.

 P3050005.JPG   28.24KB   11 downloads

I have the worms in a under-bed sweater box, with a standard box filter hanging on the side. I've got about 1/2 inch of very clean (rinsed many times) play sand in the bottom. After a couple days, the worms will all be buried into the sand, except when actively feeding.

Here are some photos I took of my current blackworm setup. I now have 1/2 lb of blackworms in a 20g tank. The filter is a simple airlift variation on a UGF that I describe here: http://forum.nanfa.o...h...ost&p=33066

I've only had these for less than a week now, but they seem to be settled in well. I got them in bulk in a special order from my LFS. The fact that I picked them up the night they received them seems to have made a lot of difference -- they were in *much* better shape than blackworms I've bought before with almost no dead ones in the mix. I'm going to try to feed them spirulina chips, as that's what has worked for me in the past.

 P3180231.JPG   35.23KB   17 downloads

 P3180229.JPG   36.18KB   18 downloads

By the way, most of the other info you'll find on the web about culturing blackworms repeats the info from Charles Drewes at http://www.eeob.iast...docs/LVCULT.htm. His method may work well for a small culture for lab purposes, but doesn't seem practical for larger-scale production.

Can a moderator please add "Live Foods: " prefix to this topic's title? It's a very good resource, and deserves to be easier to find. We're starting to get a good collection of these "Live Foods:" threads.

Thanks, Jase

it may just be the lighting and light-colored substrate, but those worms look more like tubifex than blackworms?

it may just be the lighting and light-colored substrate, but those worms look more like tubifex than blackworms?

No, definitely blackworms. If you actually manage to keep them in good conditions and feed them, they'll start dividing and growing. You'll never see that in a worm keeper. There's a *lot* of myth out there about these guys. If you realize that they grow them in giant warm ponds in California, you'll understand that they *don't* need to be refrigerated, and they don't need to be kept in less than 1" of water (to avoid "suffocation" -- give me a break!).

When they divide, it's always the new, pink growth that is showing above the sand. If you see the worms on the surface, they're strongly bi-colored -- the old part is dark brown, and the new growth is bright pink. The exposed ends are actually even much lighter/pinker colored now than when I took that picture a few weeks back.

Tubifex look similar sticking out the sand, but they constantly wave the exposed part, and are *much* thinner, although total length is similar. Another sure way to tell them apart is that blackworms do a quick helical/spiraling swim when disturbed, while tubifex just curl into a ball. Tubifex also seem to secrete some kind of mucous that causes sand grains to stick to them -- if you swirl the sand, you'll get a bunch of little balls of sand on the surface, and then start to see the worms coming out of them. Blackworms clump together when disturbed, but rapidly disperse if they have something to burrow into. Sand doesn't stick to them.

Clearly, I've spent far too long looking at worms. A web developer shouldn't know these details...

Ridiculous as it is, I think I'm one of the experts on keeping/culturing blackworms in an aquarium at this point. Everyone else keeps repeating the method of Dr. Charles Drewes, which keeps them in a shallow aquarium full of paper towels, and doesn't filter the water (severlely limiting density & feeding rate)
http://www.eeob.iast...docs/LVCULT.htm
There's no question he's *the* authority on Lumbriculus biology, but I think my method of maintaining a colony is far more productive and more practical (harvesting out of sand is a snap -- not so with paper towels).

Now the question for me (which I've tried to ask Dr. Drewes without luck) is how to go about trying to get these things to reproduce sexually, as they apparently do in the wild. In the aquarium they reproduce only by division, which limits reproduction rate (at best, I get doubling in 3-4 weeks). If you could get cocoons containing 10 babies at a time, reproduction rate would skyrocket. I really need to try to contact him again -- not sure what it is that prevents these apparently-thriving worms from reproducing sexually in an aquarium.

See Dr. Drewe's site on this:
http://www.eeob.iast...docs/Lvgen4.htm

Field-collected Lumbriculus are often larger than laboratory-reared worms. Maximal body size is about 10 cm in length (approximately 200-250 segments) and 1.5 mm in diameter. Such specimens appear as sexually mature hermaphrodites. Although never documented, sexual reproduction in mature worms probably involves copulation and sperm exchange, as seen in many earthworms. Then, worms produce transparent cocoons, each containing 4-11 fertilized eggs that undergo direct embryonic development with no larval stage (Drewes and Brinkhurst, 1990). Small worms, about 1 cm in length, emerge from cocoons in about two weeks.

Now back to my regularly-scheduled work...

Edited by jase, 10 April 2008 - 02:50 PM.

Also, I noted above that I had kind of given up on actually culturing them at one point. Now that i've started a colony with a full 1/2 pound of worms, culturing them is seeming more practical. The low reproduction rate means that you need to start with a lot, so that your daily harvest is only pulling "interest" off of the colony, and your "principle" remains. I.e. I want to always have at least 1/2 lbs of worms, and pull off only the amount they can produce each day.

I always started too small in the past to get both colony growth *and* use them daily as food for my fish. I'm now keeping 1/2 pound in a 20-long aquarium, and it's working well. Only need to change the water ever few weeks and feed with spirulina flakes, and all seems well.

Edited by jase, 10 April 2008 - 02:47 PM.

That's really cool, Jase. *adds to list of tanks to set up in the near future*

That's really cool, Jase. *adds to list of tanks to set up in the near future*

It's an easy one to "set up": water + worms + bio-filter + sand .

Just don't try a hang-on-back filter -- the worms & sand will get disturbed by the return flow and sucked into the filtration. Sponge filter would work, but my custom filter described above is better since there's no sponge for the worms to work their way into (where they'd be *impossible* to get out). If they get into the gravel, no big deal -- just swirl it around and they'll come out.

Edited by jase, 10 April 2008 - 03:42 PM.

It may be simple to set up but I still have seven tanks and a pond to move in the next month. That's why the list. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing that my local club's doing a giant auction in a week - I'll probably end up with new tanks for cheap so that I can do this sort of thing but then I'll end up with more tanks!

Here are some more recent pics of my blackworm tank. Looks to me like there's some pretty active reproduction going on here. I've pulled quite a few blackworms out since I got the 1/2 pound almost 2 months ago, and I don't think I'm making a dent in their numbers.

One really useful thing I've learned is that they *really* like a hippie vegetarian dogfood I can buy in bulk at my local co-op (this *is* Vermont, after all). I need to check the ingredients next time I go to the store, but it's working way better than anything I've used in the past, with the possible exception of Spirulina. But... this stuff is much, much cheaper than Spirulina. It tends to float, but if I let it get a little soggy and then squeeze the air out of it, it works great.

Worms in the sand. As I mentioned earlier, they're all really pink now because they're actively dividing/growing
 P4160035.JPG   32.21KB   25 downloads

Worms clumped around some spirulina and vegetarian dogfood:
 P4160034.JPG   25.98KB   19 downloads

Again, seeing how they seek out food and form clumps. When they're "full", they seem to just hang out in the sand. If I don't feed for a couple days, they come out and start crawling all over. This tank is a 20-long.
 P4170040.JPG   29.93KB   19 downloads

Fun stuff. -Jase

Edited by jase, 23 April 2008 - 09:00 AM.

OK, that does it. I'm setting up the extra (emergency) 10-gallon tonight.

OK, that does it. I'm setting up the extra (emergency) 10-gallon tonight.

Good call. My feeling is that these things should be much more popular than they are in the hobby. Just most folks don't know how to maintain them. Seems like they'd do a *fantastic* job of cleaning up decaying plant matter in an aquarium -- and you'd be the one to tell us about it, Laura. The fact that I can feed my fish heavily with these and the survivors just hang out indefinitely is a huge advantage; there's no leftover food to fall into the gravel and foul the tank.

I'm not doing anything that revolutionary here, but I haven't found anyone else on the web reporting any real success keeping them in an aquarium. The paper towel method I mentioned earlier in this thread just seems a poor substitute for a real substrate, good filtration, and food.

Laura, I can ship you some if you want. If you're buying them locally, find out what day they come in and get them that day. Once they've hung out in the LFS without filtration for a few days, they're in rough shape and take a couple weeks to bounce back from the necrosis of their mouthparts.

Like I said, my LFS sold me 1/2 lb for $18 two months back. It's a really good bargain compared to any other live foods I've purchased.

-Jase

Edited by jase, 23 April 2008 - 04:11 PM.

I actually have a good number of them growing in my Elassoma tanks. It's a nice stable live food source for them. Not sure that the population itself is stable, I just mean that there is always food about that they are interested in, even if I can't go out collecting larvae/daphnia/etc. They don't seem to like frozen bloodworms much (at least these individuals that were given to me by a friend in Mobile)

The tank is set up to have a layer of dried leaves, then a layer of soil (Hyponex brand), then a layer of pool filter sand. I like to use the sand for the more delicate plant species, like Mayaca fluviatilis, which can be crushed as you jam the stems below large bits of gravel. Also good for the finer running species like Eleocharis parvula, as the small roots seem to take to it better than very coarse gravel. (Fine gravel works well for these plants, too.) Anyway, the worms are hanging out all around, and the pygmys seem happy and well fed. Thankfully, there is a LFS that I pass by every few weeks that keeps them in stock (in a cooler in the fridge).

You may have already said this - how many did you start out with? I can buy them by the ounce.

Oh, and as to whether they "clean up" decaying plant matter, I don't know. There is detritus on top of the sand, so it's not sparkly clean. I'll try to get a photo. I imagine that they might be more likely to eat buried material before going after surface material. I can't remember - is it their heads or butts that stick up out of the sand?

You may have already said this - how many did you start out with? I can buy them by the ounce.

Like I said, my LFS sold me 1/2 lb for $18 two months back. It's a really good bargain compared to any other live foods I've purchased.

Yep, I did. This worked out to be far, far cheaper than buying them by the "portion", and they were much healthier. I special ordered and picked them up the night they got their shipment in.

Oh, and as to whether they "clean up" decaying plant matter, I don't know. There is detritus on top of the sand, so it's not sparkly clean. I'll try to get a photo. I imagine that they might be more likely to eat buried material before going after surface material. I can't remember - is it their heads or butts that stick up out of the sand?

It looks to me like it's the head end sticking out, which is a little strange. Actually, it's always the "new", pinkish end that sticks up after they divide. Don't really know how that works out -- does the new end always become the new head? Anyway, they seem to do their eating with the end that sticks out of the sand. Someday soon I'll get a good dissecting scope and be able to say for sure: http://forum.nanfa.o...?showtopic=4233

I don't think they'll eat *all* decaying plant matter, but I bet a large population would convert a pretty good amount of the decaying plant biomass back into something the fish can eat.

Have fun. I used to say that white worms were the easiest live food I've kept (http://forum.nanfa.o...?showtopic=4383), but the advantages of blackworms being fully aquatic are huge. Just took me a while to find a decent food source -- they really dig this veggie dog food.

Edited by jase, 23 April 2008 - 04:35 PM.

Very very cool stuff. I am inspired!

Just an update on my cultures. I have rotifers, turbellaria, and dero worms going at this time. The dero worms are doing much better this time around, and I have them spread throughout a few containers, one with dero and turbellaria, one with dero and rotifer, and I just gave drewish a small bottle of all three mixed. The dero seem to eat small fish pellets, while the turbellaria and rotifers EXPLODE in a day or two with the addition of some yeast.

The next bottle I set up will be for you, jase.

And if anyone else wants to try dero worms (aka micro-tubifex) I would be happy to send out cultures this summer (though I'm still convinced that blackworms would be cooler.)

Edited by Kanus, 24 April 2008 - 12:21 PM.