Culturing Live Foods for the home aquarium

[Blue Whale]

Oh I see. Pity. Hope you can "grow" them back. Melt some ice water in but don't throw ice blocks to them. I think they will survive better. The ones at seaview using chiller water if I did not remember wrongly.

[stormhawk]

Ron, I got my starters from eBay. I'm culturing the Bananaworms in the same way as the microworms. They seem to not like our heat but my culture is beginning to bloom in numbers. They take a little longer than microworms to take off. The walters are going into overdrive right now.

Wacky, I should be ready to make some new subcultures soon for the other worms, except vinegar eels at this point of time. The vinegar eel culture is not fully established yet. I made 2 bottles from the small bag of starter culture. They should be ready in a few more weeks or so.

Where daphnia/Moina is concerned, keeping them in cooler alkaline water helps. Using floating plants as shade is a good idea as well. They can be cultured in tubs but are prone to crashing. Better to buy straight from the LFS instead.

[edwardchuajh]

i see.. do you grow them straight in green water, or you give them a dose each day?

cuz its hard to find LFS which carries daphnia nowadays.. =( and yes, one of the "cultures" i did crashed, turned black and SUPER stinky.

Grindals and microworms taking off though =)

[Shaihulud]

I know Y618 carries moina quite regularly, so if you want to reseed your culture could always buy one packet from them. For me I tried to culture tubifex worms, unsucessfully.

[edwardchuajh]

Yishun's pretty far from me =(

But thanks for the info!

I read that culturing tubifex is really messy and hard, but for a couple of weeks now, my tubifex has been surviving well (growing not too sure) in a tub of water by themselves, with some moss and a tiny sponge filter.

I just throw in a crumb of algae wafer now and then. Saves me trouble of going down to the LFS each time and buying 30cents of worms, when my fry only eat like maybe 10 worms a day.

[Shaihulud]

C328 also has moina as well but not so often, or it could be they have so many customer that they sold it out. I want to culture lots of tubifex worms they are pretty picky for a worm that lives in shitty conditions.

[stormhawk]

There is a type of tubificid worm that is being cultured with some success overseas. They call them Dero worms, but we cannot find them here.

As for Daphnia/Moina. Yes, basically you feed them with the green water. Only as much as they can finish. They are filter feeders so once the water is clear, that is good enough. They should turn a little greenish from eating so much suspended algae.

Where C328 is concerned, their supply is BBS, not Moina. You can see the difference between the 2 animals if you look closely. Both move in a jerky manner, which can confuse people at first glance.

[bettaboy]

Nice information, thanks for sharing.

[edwardchuajh]

yep, C328 only has BBS so far each time I checked =P usually almost all dead or visibly many days old.

polyart is usually where I get my BBS.

[Blue Whale]

The other ma-ma shop. I just came back from there. Very lively ones. Temp using hand test roughly 26C or so.

[stormhawk]

Other shop? Which one Whale?

Edward, where BBS is concerned, it is always better to hatch it yourself. They are most nutritious within 8 hours of birth until they do their first molt. Once in the feeding stage, they lose their nutrition value unless they are given food to eat. I used Liquifry Marine in the past to feed my BBS, but it is too easy to foul a hatchery container with this.

The ones at C328 are usually already into their first molt, hence a little bigger than newly hatched BBS. Like you pointed out, usually most are either dead or a few days old.

[Blue Whale]

Stormy, C328 only got two shop, beside polyart which they bochap bochap(don't care), the other one that is full of stuffs, like a provision shop or I call it mama shop ^^ but the auntie is actually quite nice and gentle. The uncle just collect money. Don't see the son around yesterday. The shop name is known as Clementi Florist.

Instead of hatchery, try disposable one like the one the plastic bowl used for Noodles with the cap one.

[Wackytpt]

Michael,

I would like to point out to you that there isn't 2 "C328"

In block 328 at clementi, there are 2 fish shops.

They are:

Polyart also known as Polyart in the forum.

Clementi Florist and Aquarium also known as C328 in the forum. (This is the shop you term as Mama Shop)

Please don't confused others by wrongly definiing C328.

Cheers

[edwardchuajh]

Hi stormhawk,

yep I know it's better to hatch myself also, but I find it quite a chore to hatch for a batch of about 10+ fry :P. Also I think polyarts BBS is pretty decent, I see their hatchery where they hatch daily, and the BBS are usually still small and darker orange in colour which I think is premolt.

Also I interchange the food with microworms, though personally I feel fry eat more of BBS and grow faster with it. Darn picky killifish fry.

Maybe next time I cam buy some vinegar eels off a fellow foumner and they can have a bigger variety -hint hint-

[stormhawk]

Where Polyart is concerned, I always see a fair bit of eggshells in their bags. The BBS are fresh though, since they hatch it themselves. If you don't mind putting in some work to separate the BBS from the eggshells, it is a good source of live BBS.

Hahaha. Okay with regards to vinegar eels, they are more for fry that spend their time in the water column instead of hugging the bottom. Vinegar eels will swim all over the place. As for when I'll release subcultures for sale, it might take awhile. The 2 cultures I made are slowly establishing themselves. Once I see a good amount of eels in the cultures, I will start sub-culturing.

[edwardchuajh]

Cheers!

True, the bags do contain some amoutn of eggshells.. so I usually go at like 10-11am and slowly choose between the bags =) some bags have virtually no or little shells, which I believe should be the first few bags they drain.

To isolate I simply use a strong torch to shine at a corner and they all congregrate there, then I siphon and feed.

And the eels! precisely why they might be better than microworms for the killifish fry.. My fry tend to just hang in the water column and loves chasing BBS who swim around. Whereas for microworms they only show interest in the first few seconds where the worms are descending.. once they hit the bottom all interest is lost =( (until they get really hungry)

May your vinegar eels have many babies!

[stormhawk]

Problem is, they take a while before hitting the bigger numbers and harvesting them can be a pain.

Sadly, I lost my banana, walter and microworm cultures. Left them too near my window and they got fried from the heat. Looks like it's back to eBay again!

[stormhawk]

To all interested, I did a check with Kinokuniya last night regarding this book on culturing live foods by Michael R. Hellweg. The cost estimate is $80+ or so per book. I doubt it is that expensive but more likely to be around $60 or so. Anyway, I placed an order for a copy, so for those interested, just contact Kinokuniya if you intend to order one for yourself.

By the way Ed, you can try the Instant Brine Shrimp by Ocean Nutrition with the fry. See if they're interested. It looks exactly like newly hatched BBS.

[edwardchuajh]

stormhawk:

oohh thanks! hmm but what exactly is Instant Brine Shrimp? freeze-dried BBS? or decap eggs?

Also, sorry to hear about your cultures, I think the heat in Singapore is bad for culturing =P I usually leave my cultures on the balcony too, and my microworm hasn't been doing too good, and my grindal growth is slow too, just enought to feed my 3 juveniles.

[stormhawk]

My grindals and vinegar eels are finally taking off.

Regarding the Instant Brine Shrimp, see this:
http://www.oceannutrition.eu/product...w03.html&head=

It's basically newly hatched BBS, but kept fresh in some kind of preservative liquid. A tiny drop contains loads of them.

Anyway I placed a new order for the worms. They should be in over the next few weeks. 34 deg C the other day was insane.