I cultured bloodworms by accident

I think it would be best to hold off a week and send you all a bunch of fresh new worms & water. I had hoped I could get them out before this happened.
I agree that they must be eating something in the water, and with water this foul, it must be a grand buffet. I guess the adults must not eat anything?

Sounds good. Definitely include a bit of that foul water when you ship -- whatever organisms are in there must be working well as food.

Yeah, I believe with many midges the adults don't even have mouthparts. I had considered trying to actually keep a continuous culture of mosquitos, but feeding the adults is the problem there (yikes!). That should make your Mystery Bloodworms easier.

I suppose you could send a handfull of dirt if they wind up being hard to catch!

When I set up my daphnia Magna culture I used mulm from an existing tank and some grungy java moss from another tank. I had a bloodworm hatch and them my wife started commenting about the little bugs flying around the fishroom. the bugs have tapered off and I haven't seen any more worms in the tank. I guess mine didn't reproduce after turning to adults.
I only saw a handful of the worms in the tanks but had way more than a handful of midges flying around.

I can certainly vouch for at least some midges reproducing indoors.
I worked at a WW treatment plant that had indoor sand bed filters as a polish on the effluent before returning it to the environment.
Somehow adult midges would find their way in and the sand filters became infested with blood worms. The adult midges swarmed inside the building to the point that their dead bodies would pile up inches deep in front of the windows.
That in turn supported an atronomical population of spiders to the point that webs covered everything and had to be hosed down frequently. It was a real mess. At one point they installed a automatic pesticide sprayer that fogged at intervals on a timer. Even that didn't work and somebody realized all that pesticide was going into the river. Eventually they just lived with it and the lowest guy on the totem pole had to go in once a month and hose dead midges and spider webs. Yuck.

As an interesting side note, the plant pulled water from just after the sand beds to use as wash water around the plant. Blood worms would get sucked up by the pumps and distributed through the plant where they would then clog filter screens. The plant chief operator, who was an ignorent putz but believed he was college educated hot sht, called them "pipe worms" and claimed they lived only in pipes where they lived out their whole life cycle. Most of the other operator believed and repeated this myth.
When I started there, I publically contridicted this gem of wisdom, explaining what chrinomids were and how they related to the flies in the filter room. The CO publically laughed at and ridiculed my ignorence. As an answer, I collected a few "pipe worms" in a covered beaker and left them on his desk. Next morning there were "filter flies" flying around in the beaker.
Not surprisingly, I never did hit it off real well with the CO.

Edited by mikez, 14 April 2008 - 11:29 AM.

I can certainly vouch for at least some midges reproducing indoors.

Huh. I still haven't taken the time to look into this. Maybe it was glassworms that proved near impossible to maintain indoors? I definitely remember reading about *something* that was incredibly difficult to get a breeding swarm of inside...

you shoulda put them in his car...that would have impressed him...

Huh. I still haven't taken the time to look into this. Maybe it was glassworms that proved near impossible to maintain indoors? I definitely remember reading about *something* that was incredibly difficult to get a breeding swarm of inside...

There are numerous species of midges. Many of them do indeed breed in thick swarms over the water [better known as "hatches" to flyfishermen]. Others emerge in dribs and drabs over long periods and the males have to search for females [at least that's what I remember learning, could be wrong]. Presumably non-swarm breeders would do better in captivity.

Okay, I'm at the floating egg cases stage again, so I should have worms galore in a just a few days. There's not as many this time as the previous times, but there's still going to be a lot of them. After harvesting them I'll have to clean up this tank. I have fish coming this week.

Oh, by the way, Hydra are now also appearing in large number in this tank. The bright green ones, not the gray ones.

You guys might want to check out Aquariumplants.com if you ever decide you want a tank like this. Their plants are obviously filthy with critters.

Edited by Mysteryman, 21 April 2008 - 12:13 PM.

Okay, I'm at the floating egg cases stage again, so I should have worms galore in a just a few days. There's not as many this time as the previous times, but there's still going to be a lot of them. After harvesting them I'll have to clean up this tank. I have fish coming this week.

Oh, by the way, Hydra are now also appearing in large number in this tank. The bright green ones, not the gray ones.

You guys might want to check out Aquariumplants.com if you ever decide you want a tank like this. Their plants are obviously filthy with critters.

This is really interesting! I am trying to put together a sustainable aquarium and this looks to be a great species to compliment the others that I have . PM me if you still are culturing these, I'd be interested in starting up my own tank!

Okay, I'm at the floating egg cases stage again, so I should have worms galore in a just a few days. There's not as many this time as the previous times, but there's still going to be a lot of them. After harvesting them I'll have to clean up this tank. I have fish coming this week.

We haven't heard an update in a long time. Did you ever ship anything out? I'd still really love to get my hands on some of these... Cheers, Jase

*sigh*
hangs head in shame

Well, things didn't work out so well on that last batch. Those Hydra I mentioned took over the tank with alarming swiftness, and eventually I figured out not only why, but why I wasn't seeing any new bloodworms. Yes, that's right; the Hydra were gobbling up the worms as fast as they were hatching. I will have to take down this tank and start over, but not before setting up something else to keep some Hydra in until the next school year starts. I'm in the habit of providing the local classrooms with interesting critters for study that they normally can't easily get. Aquatic & terrestrial planarians, Hydra, pseudoscorpions and silverfish are local favorites.

I had moved some of these dirty plants to another tank, but in that tank I put some Tanichthys micagemmae. I do still have a limited number of adult flies in that tank at any given time, but the fish are eating most of the worms. I should point out that this tank has a normal gravel bottom instead of dirt, so maybe the dirt isn't very important as long as the tank is slam-full of plants.The fish have spawned pretty much continuously over the past few weeks, by the way. These guys are easier to spawn ( in south Alabama ) than normal White Clouds, since they prefer a warmer temperature.

I set up a sterilite tub without fish to try to get some more worms going, but so far it hasn't worked.

woops I did it too hehe.

I've a 300 gal stock tank buried in the ground outside. I've attached pvc pipe to the intake of my pump and ran that piece of pvc into a bucket. The bucket has a lid on the top and holes drilled all around the bottom. After the piece of pvc from the pump goes into the bucket it hits a 90 degree elbow and goes almost to the top of the bucket. So water has to pass through the holes in the bottom of the bucket then go to the top of the bucket to go into the pvc pipe which then delivers it to the intake of the pump. I did this to keep leaves and debris from being able to easly clog my pumps intake. A by product of this is that sludge collects at the bottom of the bucket and it's got a bunch of tiny red worms in it.. I guess their bloodworms. Inside the bucket there are also 'strings' of 'slime' that look like they contain eggs. Are these the bloodworm eggs? I guess this is actually a good thing, right? My fish get to snack on them from time to time and I suppose they're carrying out part of the biological process.... umm right?

Here is a pic of an eggcase, along with some of the offending Hydra:

Here is a pic of an eggcase, along with some of the offending Hydra:

If you can find a way to save some of these critters from being eaten, I'd still love to get some to try to culture my own. I've got about 15 live food cultures now, but you can never have too many, right?!? -Jase