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IDK what they are. Looks like they swim too smoothly to be daphnia but could definitely be something related to daphnia.
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Big Bad Blackworm Tower – Culture Journal
modified lung replied to modified lung's topic in Photos, Videos & Journals
Nice. The secret for me was that they needed a lot more food than I expected, specifically protein I suspect. Blackworms can foul their water very fast so they needed more fresh, clean water and oxygen than I expected too. I think the biggest hurdle is finding a way to give them enough of what they need that's worth the time and effort for you. I fed them any sort of vegetable scrap form the kitchen, the end crust slices of wheat bread that no reasonable human wants to eat, and biofilm I grew by letting a small amount of molasses sit in a gallon jar of water for a few weeks. They'll eat fruit too but too much will cause a bacteria bloom which can cause oxygen problems. Or if you're made of money they'll go through a pack if spirulina wafers in no time. And always have backup cultures. I lost most of my worms multiple times the last year I had them because a pump failed, sponge filter clogged, or I didn't have the energy to change enough water. An extra tip... co-culturing daphnids with blackworms works really well. I'm not sure what they're eating but you don't even have to add any extra food to sustain a small population. Or if you want a larger population, feed spirulina powder. The daphnids eat the suspended power and the blackworms eat whatever settles to the bottom.- 77 replies
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Big Bad Blackworm Tower – Culture Journal
modified lung replied to modified lung's topic in Photos, Videos & Journals
Thanks, I just have to not over do it.- 77 replies
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Big Bad Blackworm Tower – Culture Journal
modified lung replied to modified lung's topic in Photos, Videos & Journals
@Mac Jank Sry, no updates. Back problems kept me on the couch for too long so I gave everything away.- 77 replies
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Big Bad Blackworm Tower – Culture Journal
modified lung replied to modified lung's topic in Photos, Videos & Journals
An aspect of growing blackworms I never see talked about is how the amount of slime they produce affects the culture. I've been selling blackworms to a couple local fish stores (sry I'm too lazy to ship). I try to weigh the worms with as little excess water on the scale as possible. This of course is stressful to the worms. Afterward when placed in the bucket for transport, the water turns a yellowish and cloudy. I hooked up an old acrylic tank to my larger outdoor system to see it more clearly. This first picture is 1 day after stressing the worms out. The water was clear before this: It looks to me like the slime, or whatever it is, reduced the amount of oxygen the water can hold. You can see the worms trying to climb the sides of the tank to get closer to the surface which is also what they do if the air pump shuts off. Increasing aeration in this situation doesn't seem to help. I ran a small pump through the tank for a few days to clear out the water. After shutting the pump off, the water became yellow and cloudy again within a day. This next picture was taken today after the pump ran again for 2 days. The water has mostly cleared out and a lot of slime has congealed on the wall of the tank: This could be why blackworm cultures tend to crash so suddenly: population growth -> less available oxygen (or some other factor) -> stress- > slime -> less oxygen -> more stress -> more slime -> less oxygen -> crash. So the secret to maintaining a dense blackworm culture might be to use a lot of water.- 77 replies
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Big Bad Blackworm Tower – Culture Journal
modified lung replied to modified lung's topic in Photos, Videos & Journals
I think that's exactly what I have.- 77 replies
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Big Bad Blackworm Tower – Culture Journal
modified lung replied to modified lung's topic in Photos, Videos & Journals
I've gone a record amount of time without equipment failure or general laziness killing half my blackworms. The max holding capacity of a 5 gallon bucket with heavy aeration and no feed seems to be about 30 ounces. That amount goes down fast with heavy feeding which they seem to need to multiply at a quick enough rate. I moved most of my worms to a half 55 gal barrel so I can feed more heavily and not worry about water changes as much.- 77 replies
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Big Bad Blackworm Tower – Culture Journal
modified lung replied to modified lung's topic in Photos, Videos & Journals
@g.p. the PVC adapters just weight down food I put on top of the towers. The blackworms are now in a half 55 gallon barrel raised off the ground with cinder blocks + the screen cover keeps predators out.- 77 replies
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Blackwater Bloody Mary Neo Setup
modified lung replied to nabokovfan87's topic in Photos, Videos & Journals
You'll drive yourself insane trying to ID worms like that 😂😂- 411 replies
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It looks like an egg to me as well. I thought the opposite though. The head at the top with some moving mouth parts and grey blob butt. I haven't come across anything like it here though.
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I've seen leaches eating blackworms for sure. I have a crazy theory leaches might be important for fragmenting the worms—biting them in half—because I've seen some big population growth in a big tank full of mud, no gravel, and lots of leaches. Good find. I had no idea. Something I never see mentioned is how much slime or whatever it is that blackworms release into the water. The slime probably lowers the amount of oxygen the water can hold. It looks like they release even more slime when they're stressed which could be why they suddenly crash so fast and hard, especially if large population size in a small space (or maybe the increased oxygen needed by the growing population) is a stress factor. Both. The PVC is a secondary though. Leaches and planaria stick to surfaces and blackworms don't which is great. So I take my container of blackworm and dump them into a different container. Then I remove all the leaches and planaria sticking to the bottom and sides of the first container. I transfer them between containers every few hours until I stop finding more. I've never been able to remove them all this way so I add the PVC pipe to keep them more under control. Whenever I see a lot on the PVC, I just take it out and spray it down with the garden hose. Omg, that's brilliant. I'm going to do that.
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Any ideas to refine this moina/daphnia culture approach?
modified lung replied to memorywrangler's topic in Experiments
Biofuel producers will add 400ppm ammonia and even higher to grow their greenwater. Just add as much as you're comfortable with keeping in mind that if you're feeding the greenwater to your Moina, the extra ammonia in the greenwater will be added (although diluted) to the Moina culture as well. I don't remember their threshold (I wanna say it's 4ppm) but Moina don't seem terribly sensitive to ammonia. There's a paper somewhere that talks about high K causing more reproduction in Daphnia. I've never done a K test so I have no idea how high mine get or if it can crash everything. I've had adding Seachem Replenish both kill and cause a huge growth spurt over night in different greenwater cultures. Replenish has Ca, Mg, K, Na, and Cl. So too much of something can be bad. i just don't know what that is. I used to think P needed to be at least half of N but I'm not sure that's true anymore. Something I've been noticing is if P is higher or around the same level as N, there's definitely a growth delay when you first start a new culture (maybe a week, give or take). But when P is higher the greenwater seems to die off much, much slower if N runs out which makes keeping your greenwater alive a lot easier. But then there are reports of greenwater having more nutritional value if P is kept low. Idk if it's higher enough where it really matters though especially if more P = easier. -
Any ideas to refine this moina/daphnia culture approach?
modified lung replied to memorywrangler's topic in Experiments
Lol same thing just happened to me. -
Any ideas to refine this moina/daphnia culture approach?
modified lung replied to memorywrangler's topic in Experiments
I had bleached out algae when trying to use water straight from the tap. I'm not sure I've tried dechlorinator with greenwater. Dechlorinator can kill Daphnia so I avoid it. Maybe that's the cause? There's so little chlorine in my tap I just have to let the water sit over night. One thing I figured out is growing greenwater is way more complicated than you'd think. The tank on the left just started recovering from a huge protist contamination that cleared out almost all the microalgae (pic taken January 25th): All the protists died and the microalgae came back (Feb 8th): (Feb 16th): The black line relates to the greenwater concentration: Also try putting some fresh grass from your yard into the culture. Idk why but it seems to kick start greenwater better than most other things. I put ramshorn snails in there sometimes too. -
Any ideas to refine this moina/daphnia culture approach?
modified lung replied to memorywrangler's topic in Experiments
@memorywrangler Weird, I've never seen fluffy white stuff like that in my cultures. It looks like bacteria floc. Any water cloudiness? Not sure where so much bacteria would come from though. Could there be something on or in the paper towel that's feeding the bacteria? I've used coffee filter paper with good results. Try that if you have some. Ammonia is fine. You can go way higher if you can wait for it all to all be used up. That's more potassium than I would expect. Is that all from the Morbloom or is your water high in K? Or maybe I did the math wrong.