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Two years ago, I returned to fish keeping after a 30 year hiatus, and quickly became enamored with the idea of raising live foods. I had daydreamed about them I was 12 or 13 and read about exotica like “daphnia” and “scuds”. I had no idea how to acquire, much less raise, them. Now, with the internet and a grown up’s pay check, those and many other live foods are within reach. In the past two years I have tried my hand at a bunch of different live foods. At times I’ve been more excited about the live foods than the fish I was feeding them too and have frequently found myself with more live food that fish to feed them to. I even bought a microscope (ok, maybe two microscopes) so I could see what was going on. I thought I would share my experience, impressions, and especially useful tips I found or discovered along the way. Here they are in roughly the order I tried them: Vinegar Eels These were my first. So easy. Apple cider vinegar and apples in a bottle on the shelf. Tip: The method usually given for harvesting them (with the filter floss and fresh water in narrow-mouthed bottle) is overly complex. I just sucked some vinegar out into a brine shrimp net, rinsed them a bit, and dumped them in the tank. Infusoria Infusoria are a great science project: It’s good fun watching a jar of weak vegetable broth process from clear to cloudy with bacteria to clear with tiny paramecium motes of food swimming around. I had great fun looking at infusoria under my microscope. But it can be an unpredictable and smelly hassle, too. Sometimes the cultures go bad, and it can be hard to start cultures at the right moment so you have infusoria ready when your fry need it. Still, it’s cheap and readily available. Tip: Don't use cabbage or brussels sprouts to start your infusoria, or it will be extra stinky. Moina — Round 1 These guys caught my eye from the start, since they are small, I keep mostly small fish, and you can order the eggs from Geenwater Farms on Amazon. The eggs worked, and pretty soon I had a nice little colony of them growing in two 2.5-gallon drink dispensers. It was a hit-and-miss process that you can read about here: https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/31271-any-ideas-to-refine-this-moinadaphnia-culture-approach/ I tried all sort of things: Co-culturing with snails and/or black worms. Feeding the snails vegetable and watermelon scraps. Growing aquaponic strawberries with them. Adding corn husks to increase surface area which some articles suggested would be useful. Blasting them with grow lights 20 hours a day. I also tried and tried to grow some green water, but to no avail. Well, almost no avail: I could grow green water (https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/29405-crashed-moina-cultures-converted-to-accidental-green-water/), but my moina wouldn’t eat whatever variety of algae it was. In the end, it worked ok, but the cultures would crash every 6 weeks or so, which was annoying. Eventually, the drink dispensers developed cracks, I got frustrated, and I gave up (for a time…). Black Worms I tried black worms at about the same time as moina — first keeping them in a bowl with an air stone and then graduating to bigger and bigger containers. These would crash on me too — all of sudden they would all just disappear. I thought maybe they had escaped en-masse, but I never found any evidence of that. They just vanished. I did some experiments about how to prevent this: https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/31877-suggestions-including-salt-to-prevent-blackworm-culture-crashes/. My main conclusion is that building a self-sustaining culture of black worms is pretty hard. They don’t grow that fast, so you'd need a very large population to generate enough biomass to be self-sustaining. But it is pretty easy to keep them alive for months (and get some growth). This has two advantages: 1) I can buy them in larger quantities and 2) I can weather the occasional shortage (There was a really bad/long national shortage last winter). Most useful resource: https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/20459-big-bad-blackworm-tower-%E2%80%93-culture-journal/ Tips: Black worms are a widely-used model organism in biology, so there are 100s of research papers written about them. Unfortunately, very few provide practical advice about raising them. Instead, most suggest the “paper towel method” which is a completely useless mess. Just use some gravel and a sponge filter. Tips: According to one source, black worms often come infested with external parasites, which can cause cultures to crash. The solution is to soak the worms in a 5-6% salt solution for 20 minutes. Since I’ve been doing this, I’ve had no more crashes. Interesting fact: Black worms eat head down. So, when you see them sticking out of the substrate, that’s their rear end and gills. Grindal Worms I was excited about these — small, supposedly easy to culture, and definitely easy to purchase at my LFS. The only draw back is that you have to feed them every day, which is a hassle. I just fed mine cat food, and they’d do great… for a while. Then something would go wrong: Mites, fruit flies, mold, nematodes (https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/34442-whats-going-on-in-my-grindal-worm-culture/), god knowns what, and the culture would fail. It was super frustrating, because it seemed like it should be so easy. They just would never multiply enough. Maybe I harvested too much too early. Overall, very discouraging, especially since they are great size for many of the fish I keep. Tip: My LFS sold cultures with an unsalted (and preferably raw) peanut in it. It would keep the cultures going if they didn’t feed them for a day or two. I’ve never seen this tip anywhere else, and it is really helpful. Paramecium (photo credit: Wikipedia) Trying to avoid the hassle of infusoria, I ordered a pure culture of paramecium from a biological supply company. The idea is paramecium are bigger, more nutritious, and more reliable than infusoria. I didn’t really find this to be the case. Mostly I found that it was really hard to keep my paramecium culture from being contaminated and then overrun by other, smaller ciliates (which is basically what’s in infusoria), which sort of defeats the purpose. Tips: Like black worms, paramecium have been studied ad infinitum by scientists. Also, like black worms the guidance for culturing them is annoying. There are two standard methods frequently cited in the scientific literature. The first involves making a tea of timothy hay (whatever that is). The second suggests boiling a precise number of wheat berries in a volume of water. Both of these methods are needlessly fussy. For the first, I have no idea where to buy timothy hay. For the second, wheat berries, while cheap on a per-ounce basis, can be hard to find in small quantities. (Pro tip: you can buy “farrow” in the bulk food section of grocery stores. It's just wheat berries). A better solution is to just throw in a piece of dried, uncooked pasta. Snails I had a pea puffer tank for an almost a year and raised rams horn and bladder snails for them. Nothing could really be easier. You can feed them anything and they breed like mad. Mine seemed to like watermelon rind alot. Scuds (aka Gammarus) I got the scuds for the pea puffers too. They take a while to get established because their breeding cycle is about 90 days, but once they are going, they can’t be stopped. I mean they really can’t be stopped, even if you wanted to stop them. They are like cockroaches. Every tank I have is now infested with them. My conclusion is that scuds are fine if you have enough fish to keep their population in check, but this can take a significant number of fish. Also, they grow to be pretty large, so you need pretty big fish to keep them under control. For instance, my nine pea puffers in a 20-long did fine, but when I replaced the puffers with two female bettas and a 6 guppies the scuds got out of hand. When they are out of control they will eat everything. For me, they have eaten: The leaves on all my java moss Many of my stem plants (starting at the roots) Some of by Anubis Most of my crypts. Some of my java ferns. A bunch of black worms when they got into my blackwork culture (I have video of this somewhere. Scuds are savage) Corydoras eggs The breeding colony of assassin snails in one of my tanks. They also have a big downside compared to moina or daphnia: They spend most of their time hiding rather than being out one the water column where fish can easily find them. For complicated life reasons, I’m going to have to shut down all my tanks in a few months, which I think will be my only chance of getting rid of them. I don’t plan on inviting them back. They are too hard to control. Tip: To harvest I would float a piece of zucchini in the tank. After a couple hours it would be covered with scuds and I’d lift it out with a brine shrimp net. Tip: In the picture you can see a blue scud that showed up in one of my tanks. Anyone want to selectively breed the next colorful crustacean sensation? These could be the next cherry shrimp! Brine Shrimp I came late to brine shrimp, since the daily grind harvesting and hatching seemed a bit intimidating, and I really wanted moina to work. But I started breeding fish and moina couldn't keep up. Overall, it’s very clear why brine shrimp are so popular — They are no less work than all the other kinds of live food (and maybe more), but they are much, much more reliable. At first, I used those black flying saucer hatcheries, which work great for small quantities. Then (unwilling to pay for the Ziss) I moved on to a hanging beverage bottle setup. After some experimentation, I developed what I think is a reasonably nice setup and routine for hatching and harvesting. Tip: You can do much better than 3/16 airline tubing to drain your hatchery. My system uses 3/8" push-fit tubing (like RODI system fittings, but bigger) and a 3D-printed adapter to inject air. It can drain my 1-liter hatchery in 21 seconds (vs. 63 seconds for the 3/16 airline tubing based system). Take that, Ziss! Tip: There is actually difference between different brands of brine shrimp eggs. I spent too much time investigating. You can read about that here: https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/34636-investigating-differences-in-brine-shrimp-eggs/. Easy Infusoria During one of my fish breeding adventures, I was using the some ultra-fine fry food. I was probably over-feeding because a lot of fell to bottom of the small enclosure I had the fry in. I noticed that over a couple days the food gave rise to whitish layer on floor of the container. Out of curiosity, I stuck some under my microscope and found it to be teaming with ciliates and other infusoria-like critters. So, that’s how I make infusoria now: I sprinkle in some food when the fry are out of their eggs and wait for the white stuff to develop. The fry can eat the food or the critters. I found that my Live Food Food (see below) works fine for this too. Green Water I did eventually get green water going, but by accident. I had an idle 20-long grow out tank that I neglected after selling the fry and low-and-behold it turned emerald green. And this time it was the chlorella -- the good kind of green water. I didn't really know what to do with it, though. I used some to start a new moina culture (see below -- it worked fine) and gave a way some at the local fish club, but it doesn't seem to be needed to keep the moina alive, so I ended up dumping most of it. Moina — Round 2 (w/ Daphnia) After all of the above frustration, I found myself day-dreaming about moina again. This time around I bought two, 2.5 gallon aquariums and set them up with heaters, air-lift tubes for circulation, and permanent siphons and with a valve so I could harvest them easily. My eggs had apparently gone stale and wouldn’t hatch, so I ended up buy a mixed culture of moina and daphnia at my local fish club auction. I’m keeping it simple this time: No intentional co-culturing — just the moina and the daphnia. And all I feed them my Live Food Food (recipe below). Shifting from drink dispensers to aquariums was a huge win since I can actually clearly see what’s going on inside. So far, so good. It’s been two months and nothing has crashed. The moina and daphnia seem to coexist just fine. The main difference with my approach this time is based on a detail in this excellent article (https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FA024) that I had overlooked: They don’t suggest raising moina as a long-term, self-sustaining culture. They suggest doing it as a batch culture. So, this time, I’m expecting them to crash and I’m prepared to strip the tank and start again (which is why I have two cultures going). By accident, these cultures also produce significant quantities of dero worms and seed shrimp. Tip: Only feed moina and daphnia when the water is crystal clear. This prevents fouling. Tip: Bending acrylic tubing is fun! The overflows are made from 3/4" acrylic tubing that I heated and bent with a heat gun. Then I epoxied a drip irrigation valve to one end. The air valve at the top lets me draw water up to get it into siphon. Then I can dispense at will! I also built the airlifts by bending and drilling smaller acrylic tubing. Live Food Food Finally, I thought I’d share my recipe for my Live Food Food. It’s a tweaked version a recipe from Aqarimax Pets ( https://www.aquarimax.com/). They suggest mixing it with water which is a hassle, but I just keep in a plastic jar with holes drilled in the top and sprinkle it into my tanks. This is what I feed daphnia, moina, and black worms. I also use it to create infusoria too. Ingredients: 1 part garbanzo bean flour 1 part pea protein 1 part brown rice flour 2 parts spirulina powder Instructions: Combine. Mix. Feed. Notes The first three ingredients are available in the bulk food or specialty flour section and are super cheap. Spirulina powder is a little more expensive and available from Amazon. Here’s a rough nutritional analysis: Protein — 40.55% Carbohydrate — 40.76% Fat — 6.13% Fiber — 5.22% It's roughly similar to some commercial fish foods I looked up. The Future As I mentioned above, I have to shut down my all my tanks in a few months, but I should be back in business (scud-free) next summer. I think my first big project is going to be to build some 5-gallon moina/daphnia cultures into a sump+refugium+auto-feeding setup to simplify the feeding of micro-predators like scarlet badis, indostomus paradoxus, and freshwater pipefish. I have a forty-gallon tank that would be perfect for it.

On the Live Food Cultures Facebook group there has been a lot of people talking about making vinegar eel culture in a way that's more similar to microworms (with an oatmeal medium). These are the instructions I used as a basis: https://thekillifish.net/vinegar_eel_culture/ http://fishguysplace.com/livefood.html#hdve The sandpaper was from something I read in a book that roughing up the edges makes it easier for worms to climb. I'm using ACO dense poly pads ripped on half for the air hole. Now that I'm posting this is clear to see that the container is not clear which may be annoying for trying to see them climb up. Something else to try may be to get two identical containers and do vinegar in one and oats in the other.

I've been struggling to sustainably and densely culture moina for a year or so and I recently happened on this approach which seems promising. I have two 2.5-gallon containers that I started with some moina and old aquarium water. They are lit by a really powerful LED grow light that runs 12 hours/per day. As you can see, I have a lot of algae growth And I have really great crop of big, fat moina. Since I got the light, I haven't been feeding them anything. To be clear, I don't think it's technically green water, although it has a green tinge. Most of the algae are on the sides, but it seems that somehow the moina are eating it. Despite the current bounty, there are some problems. Most notably, the algae grown is really out of control: It pearls a great deal it took the water from Nitrate/nitrite = 40/7 to 0/0 zero in a day or two. This makes me think it's ripe for a crash. The other problem is that takes a lot of power: the light is 120W so 12 hours is about 1.4kWh/day which is about $200/year. So my next move is to reduce the photoperiod (unfortunately, the light is not dimmable). But I'm curious if anyone else has suggestions, has tried anything like this, or has any other ideas on improving the setup. I have a few specific questions, too: Are the moina eating the algae that grows on the side, or do I effectively have a very pollute, weak green-water culture? Could I just feed these cultures Easy Green? Is there something better/cheaper? Thanks.

I grabbed this photo from my grindal worm to verify that the little white specks are eggs. But what I found is confusing. In the photo we have: A: An egg cocoon B: An egg cocoon with newly hatched worms inside. C : An adult grindal worm D : A young grindal worm about the same size as the ones in the cocoon E: The Mystery and point of this question -- a much smaller worm of some kind. Is 'E' a tiny grindal worm or some other species? Maybe some kind of nematode? There are lots of them if I scan around with my microscope.

I have went crazy over the months since my return to the fish hobby and like to grab foods I hear about, test them. Often fish are indifferent, some of the same kinds in one tank dislike the food but the other tank go feral lol. Not sure why, as some are from the same breeder. Anyways, curious what everyone digs for fish specific or just general food? What's some of your faves? My Angels LOVE Tetra Flake(the OG tropical fish formula), but none of the others like it. SO I went with variety...here's some of what I use and the fish seem to like. EBO Foods, found a source and boy do my Corys/Plecos LOVE it. Before that I found a brand through an ebay food creator, Aquatic Foods, and their bloodworm pellets. I switch up between protein foods and algae/spirulina based ones. Been thinking of trying out zucchini(local from the farmers market and WASHED of course), but haven't yet. My nanos all really dig LEGIT Nano pellets, but also are fans of leftover Tetra Flake and also Hikaru Micro Pellets...they aren't super keen on the massivore delight pellets like I thought they'd be since I know @DansFish like to feed em that(the nano 48 gal tank is primarily fish from there)...HEY maybe they just stop liking certain things. 😂 My guppies are all Hikaru freeze dried bloodworms & Royal Guppy Mignon Pellet. I tried tubifex cubes and they pick at em, really not fond. The Odessa Barbs and Mollies prefer Royal Mignon as well, but LOVE massivore delight pellets & all of them swarm, decimate them in no time. Lastly, I use live foods ie micro/banana worms and soon white worms. I have tried brine shrimp a few times, but its such a mess at times and woooo stinky if it falls somewhere unhidden, that I just stick with the worms. This summer I plan to try my hand at daphnia and bloodworm cultivation as well. 🙂 What about everyone else?

Anyone culture their own black worms? I need advice on where to source, how to start, how to maintain! I’ve got pea puffers and want to add more live foods to their diet but looking for the easiest options.

Necessity being the mother of invention..... My spotted congo fry came just before when the family vacation in a few weeks. A vacation right in the middle of puffer growing season does not end with puffers for me. I decided to attempt to automate the feedings using a bigger paramecium culture a wifi timer and a topoff doser. This is version 3 of the automated paramecium feeder (and possibly a moina feeder). The cloudy 20 high to the right of the 60 breeder fry tank is a paramecium culture using wheat berries and yeast filled half way should be ready by then but for now the half gallon mason jar is good for approximately 30 one minute 50ml feedings. The polyfilter cube seen in the german breeding ring is a visual indicator of water quality for me. Its just a little insurance against any organic buildup. The ring is floating in a 60 breeder with a sicce pro 900 for filtration and the sponge filter on the ring. You can see a puffer fry eating a paramecium at the end

I was wondering Is it possible to keep a live food with fish in the tank so the fish have a constant food supply without the fish eating all of them and destroying the population? if so what live foods would work?

I’m thinking about putting together a heavily planted “nano predator tank”. It would be stocked with micro predator nano fish. Candidates include: Pea puffers Scarlet Badis or tiger badis Indostomus paradoxus (aka armored stickleback, aka alligator toothpick fish) Sparkling gouramis Pygmy sunfish Fresh water pipe fish What else? has anyone kept any of these fish together? How did it go? Any other stocking ideas?

9 months ago I started a pair of moina cultures that includes some ramshorn snails to clean up the leftover food and some floating plants to absorb nitrogen. They worked ok on and off. They'd crash and recover, etc. Then 2 months ago I went out of town for 10 days. As The Internet suggested, I took out almost all the moina, hoping to revive them when I returned. When I got back, I added some black worms (because why not?) and started feeding again. The moina did not recover, so I added some eggs, which seemed like it might work, but then didn't. Now I have two, apparently thriving, green water cultures with snails and black worms (which are not proliferating, which is fine -- I've started raising black worms separately), and a very rich variety of other critters (notably cyclops). The green water would be great and everyone says it's so hard to maintain, but I have no moina to feed it to. I'm trying to figure out what to do. Options include: 1. Dump and everything except some of the snails and start over. 2. Dump one of them and start over fresh with moina and feed the green water too them. 3. Do 90% water changes to keep the green water under control and reseed with moina. 4. Do something else someone here suggests. 5. Chuck it all.

I'm thinking about giving vinegar eels a try but the infusoria culture made the house smell and "Honey, I want to try breeding tiny worms to feed to the fish. By the way the pantry will small like rancid vinegar now." Seems like a hard sell. https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/vinegar-eels

I've read that they are great for conditioning fish to breed but I can't seem to find them anywhere. My LFS doesn't have them, no way chain stores do, AquaBid has nothing, and even Amazon/Etsy only come up with grindel worms. Where do people normally get them to start a culture?

BLACKWORMS Setting up a dedicated tank to try and breed blackworms. Hopefully this will be a good learning experience and hopefully it works. I’ve heard a lot about culture crashes and the smell that goes along with it. Definitely will try to avoid that. I purchased 4oz of blackworms from my LFS yesterday and had to keep them in refrigerator overnight. When I got them home I did a water change with spring water with minerals added back in. Then placed in refrigerator for the night. Today I set up a 3 1/2G tank little less than 1/2 full with same spring water. It has the filter built in to side of tank, slotted openings allow water to go through an ACO coarse sponge in the collection area. Water is then pumped to top of tank and flows through a spout back into tank. Will be adding a air stone to help with surface agitation and fragmentation. I will not be heating this tank, my other no heater tank runs at 68F and this should run close to the same. (Will monitor) Placed a very thin layer of gravel. Then added a vallisneria and some PSO to help with nitrates, both placed with weights. I am hoping some worms will be sucked through the filter system to hopefully be divided during their trip. Also hoping not to many go through at a time to cause clogging. Or get built up over time, will need to keep a close eye on that. I did a small feeding in each tank I plan on feeding these too and as you can guess they absolutely loved them. This will be my first experience cultivating live food. Will also in the near future be trying vinegar eels, daphnia, and mosquito larvae. I will also try my hand at infusoria if needed, hopefully enough is naturally occurring (is that right? Maybe breeding? Cultivating?) in my 125G. Will start feeding tonight, light dusting of krill flake. Will try to alternate foods krill flake, spirulina pellets, vegetable, and fruit. Feedings will be every 2-3 days. As I keep a close eye on water parameters I will change 75%-ish water weekly. Would appreciate any advice or tips or point out anything I missed.

I started setting up my pair of moina cultures today. My goal is to produce enough to feed my two small display tanks daily and to use them in place of BBS for the raising small numbers of fry. Hopefully, the built-in spigots will make harvesting super easy. I have a pair of 2.5Gal water dispensers and I've kicked things off with: Some gunk from an established aquarium's filter API quick start Boiled veggies and resulting water A handful of crushed coral A few snails An airline blowing coarse bubbles After the water get's a little funky, I'll add the moina from some small cultures I've been running. I have a variety of things in mind to try: Adding a small gravel filter co-culturing dero worms co-culturing black worms floating plants to keep nitrates down Adding emersed plants whose roots will soak up nitrates and provide more surface area (which is supposed to boost moina production) Anything else I should think about trying?

TLDR: I think feeding Moina may have killed some of my Pseudomugil Signifers. It's a sad day in the fish room, or rather, the fish office. One of my Pseudomugil Signifer males passed - leaving me with only one male and two females. I am used to death and death with fish especially. This passing isn't sad, it's frustrating. I had purchased a group of 6 fish - 4 females and 2 males. One female kicked the bucket during shipping and another female died within 24 hours of arrival. I was left with 2 males and 2 females - not ideal. I thought I'd see what I could do with these guys. The fish were timid for weeks. I never saw them do anything but hide behind the sponge filter in their bare bottom tank. I hadn't even seen them eat. I still have yet to see them eat any flake or pellet foods. I have been feeding them scuds, BBS, worms, and some frozen foods. I finally got some moina colonies running well (which took a surprising amount of effort) and have been feeding them to the signifers in small amounts for about a week. Yesterday I had a stellar moina harvest and did a big feed with all my tanks (I keep multiple Pseudomugil species tanks and one Peudomugil community tank). I guess the Signifers may have over eaten..? Maybe something else? My luminatus, furcatus, and others love to overeat - but not to death... I also noticed the signifers never looked full compared to my other species of blue-eyes. The other three fish in the tank aren't doing much and haven't moved all day. Normally after a big feed of BBS, they are very active with the mop. All other tanks are normal after being fed the same moina. My poor guys - they had finally established pecking order, displaying, and laying eggs. I can not say for certain if the dominant male died or if it was the other guy. As far as water quality, water was changed 3 days ago. I change water 1-2x a week as I am running small bare bottom tanks. The water is RO and conditioned tap mix. I'll change the water again tonight and keep my fingers crossed the other three make it. P.S. I wrote this a day ago and another female died over last night, even with the 50 percent water change. The remaining male and female are just swimming in the slow current. I plan on rinsing moina in the future in case there was something nasty breeding in their water.

I just recently started buying live black worms & I saw this strange thing inside the bag, it was moving around clearly alive with the worms. I’m worried it’s some kind of parasite but I haven’t a clue. Could someone please help indentify what this could be? I really hope I haven’t put my fish family in danger before I noticed!

Hey Nerms, I recently picked up a baby brine shrimp hatchery (San Fran brand) since baby brine is *incredible*. However, I don’t have a ton of tanks (7) due to apartment life at the moment. I have seen Cory’s videos on hatching but my question is, once hatched how long can I keep the hatched bb alive before they will die? Can I put the live baby brine that I don’t use in the fridge and keep them for a few days? Or is the more logical option just to use less eggs per hatching? I am thinking I won’t need an entire egg pack worth of baby brine to feed my tanks for a single day but I’m new to hatching live so any advice is appreciated. My goal is to make it as cost effective as I can and reduce waste as much as possible. Any other helpful tips are much appreciated! Thanks!

Pretty long title I know, I noticed Aquarium co-op sells brine shrimp eggs, I was wondering if anyones had experience with buying them, raising them (with quality feed) and feeding them to their Betta as a live treat? Or any fish really. I know live food/frozen food is only as good as what it eats but I was just wondering if anyones tried this. Is there any specific minimum tank size I should get for the shrimp? I know ac-p sells fry food as well.

I was giving all my tanks some frozen bloodworms this evening when all of a sudden a scud in the betta tank grabbed a bloodworm and was off like a shot. I was so startled, I thought in was a small fish. (Our scuds are big.) I thought maybe the scud was confused, so I dropped a few bloodworms in one of my scud tanks. The crowd went wild. They loved them. Before long it looked like most scuds in the tank were swimming around hugging a hunk of bloodworm. I have been feeding the scuds hornwort and chunks of pumpkin and banana. Now and then I give them a bit of fish food. I wasn't impressed with the rate at which they were multiplying. I am eager to see if bloodworms will help. The fish in my native tank love scuds. They spend long periods, staying very still in the water, staring at rocks waiting for a scud to appear. At first I thought maybe the fish were confused, or depressed until I saw one catch a scud. Anyone else have interesting food they feed their scuds?

I recently fed my 10 gallon community tank some mosquito larvae, and the fish went crazy. Since then I have been wondering if there is a live food that can live in the same tank and be eaten when the fish are hungry.

Currently well into a blackworm colony culture with daphnia which I hope to run from September to May. That covers our winter time frame up here where overnight lows are regularly to single digits and a few times over the years have hit -20 F. Not conducive to successful shipping of living anything. The blackworm culture now in its 2nd month is in an 18x12x9 tank with non-crushed coral chunks for a base and a medium sponge filter. I siphon the bottom every time I feed them off and change 1/2 the water from the tanks above every other day. Food is a repashy block, spirulina tablets, or spirulina powder. I have yet to find the best balance of worms vs filtration and water volume. It has been a challenging and somewhat successful project so far despite that ongoing search for balance. The coral seems to break the worms up decently and effectively replaces the worms I feed off. A few weeks ago I decided to add daphnia from the outdoor pond to this culture before the daphnia freezes solid for the winter. possibly top keep the blackworm culture cleaner by filtering the water a bit more. I started feeding the tank my daphnia food: coop purchased extreme spirulina flake which I mortar and pestle down to powder. The green water is primarily from the spirulina powder. At the moment i would guess 2 lbs of blackworms from 1/2 lb I started it with and around 1000 "Russian red" daphnia from.the initial net full. I Probably will swap sponpge to a box filter to clean the water a bit more but both populations seem happy enough to be reproducing and feeding the fishroom The outdoor daphnia pond has already formed 1/4 inch of ice overnight but is still producing enough to feed the room. I did not expect it to be producing at 40-42 degree water temperature but probably no more than 5 days from it being fully frozen until late spring. Tough food to beat once established. Has anyone done multiple live foods in the same container, tank, etc? What were they and would you recommend running them together?

If you think you know what type of worms these are please let us know. I posted a short youtube video at the bottom of this post. I netted some floating plants out of one of my tanks tonight and then set it over a container so that it didnt drip all over my desk. Later when i went to dump the net out i realized the net had strained all of these worms out of the floating plants ans down into the container seeking water. I have no idea what type of worms these are. Apparently they were living in the roots of the floating plants i would assume eating the detritus that is caught there. Anyway they are pretty interesting and actively seek out bits of floating plants when i added them to the container. Im wondering if i should add them back into my tank or not. They seem like they would be a great live food source for small fish. Let me know what you think i should do. Aquarium Mystery Worms Video - Youtube

Welcome to my Fish Closet! This is where I store all the tools one acquires in the keeping of fish, culture zooplankton for my picky eaters and keep my only freshwater tank. Oh yeah and lots and lots of plants! I thought I would have to come to the true #nerms to get some appreciation and advice. It's by no means a finished project or very organized; but it's fully functional and I'm getting proud of it. I really attribute a lot of my fish knowledge to this community and even though I mostly keep marine tanks I wanted to share what I've been learning and enjoying. All in hopes you see how easy it is to start with live foods or diversity your live feeds. This year I took the time to design a system to simply culture some popular live feed organisms. I have found it to be easier than I thought and really rewarding to maintain. I plan on going into further detail on their maintenance but as a quick overview they are 1gallon jugs that are drilled for air, running off a few USB air pumps. They are all at 30 ppt salinity, fed phytoplankton daily, and harvested once or twice a week. I also use a ziss artemia blender to cook up brine every two days, extra brine also goes into a culture jug to be enriched and matured. I keep a colony of Blue Snake Endlers (Campoma no.31) in a heavily planted tank. The key feature being the spider wood moss island, adorned with houseplants. I really wanted to think outside the box and have been surprised at my success every step of the way. I plan to keep adding houseplant cuttings to the top and let the lilies, willow moss, and ludwigia go wild under the water. It's an easy set up that I can let get extremely overstocked and the plants just seem to do better. The last third is blanketed with bright indirect light which is perfect for houseplants, terrariums, and aquatic mosses. So I rotate propagations, rehabilitations, and transitioning plants here as needed. This is a brief overview of my fish closet. Please leave any questions or comments below . Plus, I'll have a species list eventually but if you really want to know what something is before then let me know that too! @Fragilenanotank

I’m sure it would be expensive to sort out certain things but what do you guys think of a company that would do that ? Would you guys pay the higher price for a more natural food ?