breeding black worms!!!

[kahisr20]

anyone know how to raise and breed blackworms and is it hard to do...

[Ardan]

I believe it to be difficult as you have to cut the worms for them to regenerate. Food sources can be a source of bacteria.


hth

[Mike_T]

here's some info:

http://forum.simplydiscus.com//index...;threadid=1356

-mike 8)

[DarkDiscus]

Before I changed his tank and moved, I had a self renewing colony of blackworms in the gravel of my Nicaraguan cichlid's tank. Just a light layer of large gravel which I siphoned weekly. Apparently the siphoning broke up the worms and they would regenerate fairly quickly.

Whenever I would siphon I'd suck up a ton of the blackworms even months after I stopped feeding them in that tank.

Temperature was 75F.

John

[nacra99]

Hmm... that link that Mike posted doesn't seem to work ... perhaps things got shifted around when we moved to the new server.

I've been keeping blackworms in a tupperwares on my shelf with quite some success. Each tupperware is about 2-1/2 gal filled to about 4 inches of water with an airstone in the middle.
For substrate, I use brown paper bags from the grocery store. The brown paper is torn up into approx. 3-4 inches long square pieces and simply dropped into the tupperware. The paper will float at first, but leave it there for a couple of hours, and with the airstone bubbling away at it, it sinks to the bottom. Just simply stick some blackworms into that baby and that's basically it. I add new paper to the tupperware when the old paper in there has almost broken down completely.

For feeding, i use flake food a little at a time. The flake is red in color so i only feed when they have consumed all the food from the previous feeding. I.e when all the red disappears. Currently, it takes about a day and a half for it to disappear.

I do 75% waterchanges every week. Very soon the paper will start to break down and you will have all this fiber floating in the the water with the worms. I find that waterchanges removes some of the excess fiber and probably removes a good amount of waste.

As for harvesting, I have yet to find a simple way without picking up some paper fiber as well. Maybe somone here has an idea? So far the most effective way i have used is by using cheesecloth. I made a little cheesecloth cup by wraping cheesecloth over a cylindrical wire frame. Partially submerge the cheesecloth in a bowl of water, place some worms from the tupperware into the cup, and after half an hour or so, the worms would have made their way out of the cheesecloth and into the bowl of water, leaving the dead/ sickly worms and some of the paper fiber trapped in the cheesecloth. Rinse the bowl of worms a couple of times and then feed.

I also find that by stirring the entire culture once in a while, it'll agitate the worms and they will start spazzing out, contracting and jumping around. I also noticed that sometimes when they did this, they spazzed themselves broken into 2 parts.... imagine that! Maybe that's how they reproduce.. by spazzing out!.. so maybe agitating them a little bit might help the "birds and the bees" along. But i keep 6 cultures and harvest each for about 3 days... I'm not sure if this rate will be self sustaining in the long run, but for the past 2 months or so, it seems to be pretty ok.

Yikes... this turned out to be a pretty long post. I'll shut up now.
Cheers
Marc

[brewmaster15]

Hi Marc,
CBW don't reproduce sexually, except for very rarely. Their main form of reproduction is asexual..... They are made to break into pieces and each piece grows a new worm. Odds are the physical act of crawling thru gravel (johns tank) or paper fibers is breaking some. I have even noticed that rinsing the worms is enough to often break them. I have tried culture experiments extensively. You can do it, but Its not worth it on a small scale if you have a lot of fish,, IMO. If you want to increase production... use a fork to gentle stir them

Worm farms make use of this and physically rake the worms to break them. (source of info...dan at aquatic foods)


hth,
al

[limige]

i'd like to know what the cleanest foods would be for them, i can't really see them eating flake...i know cary used to feed them banana peels...

what's the best foods?

mike

[kahisr20]

yo where do you buy cheesecloth from...and yea thanks for all the advice it all help now i have plenty of them to feed my discus....i use floating pellets cause is cheap....i soak them first then smash them with my fingers it will sink to the bottom of the tank and couple of hours later u see them all over the pellet....us springly cause it well make the water dirty....i would recomend to chang 50% water weekly.....anyone from hawaii holla.....

[nacra99]

yo where do you buy cheesecloth from...and yea thanks for all the advice it all help now i have plenty of them to feed my discus....i use floating pellets cause is cheap....i soak them first then smash them with my fingers it will sink to the bottom of the tank and couple of hours later u see them all over the pellet....us springly cause it well make the water dirty....i would recomend to chang 50% water weekly.....anyone from hawaii holla.....

I get mine at a local grocery store. It's down the baking isle in mine, but it might be different at yours.

Cheers
Marc

[GulfCoastDiscus]

anyone from hawaii holla.....

I use to live on the leeward side (Waianae) behind Tamuras. Married a local girl, Henry Peters's(former bishop estate trustee) daugther. I now live in Texas.

Aloha Bra,
Dan

[kahisr20]

cool bra and thanks (nacra99) for the info......hawaii is still the best no matter where you live....

khai