# happiness is live food.



## Jeff232 (Nov 4, 2006)

After the addition of a very picky fish to my tank I bought a bag of live brine shrimp from my LFS to prevent him from starving. WOW! I thought my fish went nuts for their flakes in the afternoon and the occasional freeze dried tubifex cube but nothing compared to this, they were eating till they regurgitated then they ate some more. Im tempted to start some live food cultures now instead of that quarantine tank ive been contemplating and just not add anything else to the tank unless its a food. How hard is it to keep enough live brine shrimp going to feed about 30 2inch long fish?


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## JanS (Apr 14, 2004)

It's not hard, but it time consuming and demanding to keep them going all the time. 

You don't really need a tank as big as a q-tank for fish (and that is a necessity, so I wouldn't nix that from your plan), but you could use something like a gallon jug with an airstone to culture the live food.

Another great option is black worms if your store carries them. I have to order them, so it is kind of messy to clean them up and keep them alive in the fridge, but the fish go wild over them.


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## IndianaSam (Mar 25, 2005)

I almost exclusively feed live food these days. I'm currently culturing grindal worms, blackworms, and flightless fruit flies. I'm also hatching baby brine shrimp (not really culturing).

I have some Dario dario that will only eat live food so I need to have these cultures going. However, ALL of my fish love, love, love the live food.

Sam


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## bristles (Mar 7, 2006)

I second the Grindal worm idea, they are very easy to raise and do not make a mess, & the fish all go crazy for them.

Sam~ how do you do the blackworms ? I've wanted to culture them for a long time and cannot find good info.


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## Burks (May 25, 2006)

Anyone here use vinegar eels?

Been wanting to try live food myself. The eels seems super simple to keep and maintain.


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## IndianaSam (Mar 25, 2005)

bristles said:


> Sam~ how do you do the blackworms ? I've wanted to culture them for a long time and cannot find good info.


I'm currently running two blackworm cultures in two 10 gallon tanks with air-driven sponge filters, the tanks are heated to 72F. The tanks contain mulm from some other sponge filters and a handful of java moss. They are filled to approximately 6 or 7 gallons.

It's been about 3 weeks since I deposited 1/8th of a pound of blackworms in each tank and they seem to be doing great.

Each population has approximately doubled so I have 1/4 pound in each tank. That's with feeding the occasional worm to my fish. Once the cultures grow a little more then I'll start feeding them to my fish in earnest.

I feed spirulina wafers, sinking brine shrimp pellets, spirulina powder and any old fish food I have sitting around. I feed them about once a day.

I do water changes on a weekly basis with aged water from one of my planted aquariums, but I'm not sure if this is needed. In one culture I also keep some wild type cherry shrimp (as a canary-in-the-coalmine for organic waste build-up). They have shown no stress so I'm not even sure if weekly water changes are needed if you have some kind of growing plant to act as nitrate sponge.

It's pretty easy to culture them. The key is to build up a sizable population so that it will become self sustaining while being fed to your fish.

Here's a great link if you're interested. It's really what finally inspired me to try raising blackworms.


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## Muirner (Jan 9, 2007)

This is probably easy to answer, but I'll ask anyways. How do you feed to make sure everyone gets fed? I'll explain. I'm setting up a 55gal tank and plan to have various fish in it, starting from a few at first to more later. How am i going to make sure that everyone gets fed, expecially if i did something like brine shrimp? (the same thing holds true with flake food I guess too)


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## IndianaSam (Mar 25, 2005)

Muirner said:


> This is probably easy to answer, but I'll ask anyways. How do you feed to make sure everyone gets fed? I'll explain. I'm setting up a 55gal tank and plan to have various fish in it, starting from a few at first to more later. How am i going to make sure that everyone gets fed, expecially if i did something like brine shrimp? (the same thing holds true with flake food I guess too)


When I squirt baby brine shrimp into my tanks they quickly become dispersed in the current. So they're kind of "everywhere" in the top half of my tanks. I haven't noticed a problem with certain fish, but the only shy fish I keep are in a tank all by themselves. Certain species can just be out-competed for food by other, faster, more aggressive species.


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## IndianaSam (Mar 25, 2005)

Burks said:


> Anyone here use vinegar eels?


I've never done vinegar eels, but I've heard that they are INSANELY easy to culture. I used to raise microworms and they where very easy too, but stinky. Very stinky.

Both foods are great for small fry, but not really good for anything else. Sometimes I would feed microworms to my rummynose tetra. They liked it, but didn't go crazy for them like they do for grindals and blackworms. I think that the microworms were just too small for them.


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## John P. (Nov 24, 2004)

I've been culturing daphnia for a while. Easy, and fish love them!


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## nana (Dec 12, 2006)

Burks said:


> Anyone here use vinegar eels?
> 
> Been wanting to try live food myself. The eels seems super simple to keep and maintain.


Yeah, vinegar eels are super easy to culture. I have a culture going that I have not attended to in 4 months - still growing strong. Vinegar eels are extremely small so they are suitable for small fry. I used them when I raised a batch of praecox rainbow fry which are super small upon hatching.

The only difficult step is harvesting them. The smaller ones even go through a coffee filter.


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## blyxa (Jan 1, 2007)

I have had many vinegar eel cultures. I harvest them by sucking up the worms at the top of the bottle (mine are kept in a glass dressing bottle) with an eye dropper, if you skim the surface of the vinegar than you can get them without too much vinegar. But if you get too much squirt them in a cup of dechlorinated water to dilute it. Wait a minute so them come to the surface then back in the eye dropper they go. 

Vinegar eels are great for fry and small fish (under 2 inches) but you have to have extremely large quantities (easy to do except for the smell) to feed bigger fish.


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## blyxa (Jan 1, 2007)

Another thing, it has been shown (and I know from personal experience) that fry feed just vinegar eels for the first weeks of life will die randomly without any symptoms. It is because vinegar eels don't hold enough nutrition. So be careful!


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## bristles (Mar 7, 2006)

Sam~ 
Thanks much for the info & link, I raise angels so that site is right down my ally  

John


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## Tiapan (Jun 14, 2006)

im going to have to try those. has anyone used blackworms for african cichlids before ?


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## Philip C (Jan 1, 2007)

I read this article and was thinking about give it a try once it warms up a bit.
www.jerseyshoreas.org/files/library/FreeFishFood.pdf


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## crataegus (Nov 16, 2006)

*Skeeters*

Since someone brought up mosquito culturing, I was wondering what people thought about this DIY project from a school in Taiwan. I imagine that you could add spirulina and powdered fry food to the water to make the larvae more nutritious for the fish.


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## kimbm04r (Apr 22, 2005)

I had vinegar eels when I was raising Bettas. In fact I bet they are still in the fish room on the shelf and doing fine. I can hardly walk into the room because it is being used for storage at the moment. I will have to look and see how they are. If anybody wants a start, I can probably send them one if they are willing to pay the shipping.

When I wanted to harvest them, I would put them in a wine bottle with the culture going just to the neck of the bottle, I would then put filter floss into the neck just so it contacts the culture and put fresh water above the floss. The eels will swim through the floss into the fresh water and you can just use the eye dropper to suck them up and feed, add more fresh water and start over.


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## gnatster (Mar 6, 2004)

> Been wanting to try live food myself.


Yeah, love the way you can feel it squirm as you swallow.


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