Black worms

[Chiclid addict]

I want to get my discus some blackworms just to add some more variety their diet is there anything I should know?

[Fish Folk]

13 hours ago, Angelfishlover said:

I want to get my discus some blackworms just to add some more variety their diet is there anything I should know?

@Daniel can provide you very experienced feedback.

Our experience is as follows...

If they’re healthy, your discus are going to go bananas for them. 
 

Here’s a a video showing a number of our fish enjoying them...

Now... unfortunately, sometimes you end up buying black worms from “middle-men” rather than true black worm farmers. As a result, they’re often half of them dead-on-arrival. This can greatly complicate effective preparation and cleaning of them.

Here is exactly how we do it (glad to hear from others though). There are some folks with much better systems no doubt! We can keep them going for a few weeks this way, so we’re not trying to cultivate them long term. 

We order in 1/2 or 1 lb quantities. They arrive in a plastic bag. We rinse these out into a plastic Sterilite container (pictured below) from Walmart using cycled room temperature water from our Goodeid tank. This Sterilite container has a groove around the bottom designed for “nesting” the containers in stacks. This groove will always hold water, but you won’t cover the worms up with water. They will do well with exposure to air inside the closed container in the refrigerator. The first thing to do is rinse them out until no cloudy, bloody, disgusting water pours off. This can take as much as 80 oz or more of water from the Goodeid tank (we draw it out in a small measuring pitcher). Basically... you repeatedly pour in, then slowly pour out once worms have settled down to bottom. In the end you want _some_ water to be left in the container, but not so much that the worms are all under water once you put them in the fridge. If you watch the video carefully, you can see the consistency and ratio of worms to water we use. Every day we rinse them out, and store in the fridge.

One thing to look for and flush are leeches. We remove these with tweezers They tend to grow in the same tanks with black worms. They are colored lighter, and are stubby. Healthy black worms are dark brownish or slightly red. If your worms are all tan... you might have a bunch of dead ones.

They do crawl a bit, and may surprise you with escape attempts! They tend to pile up in blobs in the container. We feed by sucking them up into a syringe and feeding from there to fish (see video).

Discus really become wildly different creatures when eating black worms! It’s an excellent food for them, providing fat that is hard to get elsewhere.

We also “seed” some tank substrate with black worms. We do this for our Okefenokee Pygmy Sunfish and our Rainbow Darters. The worms live in the substrate a long while, providing ample snacks for fish. Obviously the worms can thrive completely underwater... but every time we’ve tried it outside from an established tank, they spoil and die.

So... all that said, you should go for it! Refrigerate them. Rinse them off in cool tank water.

Edited May 2, 2021 by Fish Folk

[Daniel]

I think @Fish Folk pretty much covered it in the above post. My advice is...do it! Your discus will love you for it.