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Big Bad Blackworm Tower – Culture Journal


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I officially settle on an almost effort free blackworm culture method. It features the gravel towers and 5 gallon buckets with an overflow pipe to make water changes extremely easy.

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A cut and rolled up scotch pad inserted into the overflow pipe to prevent losing blackworms through the drain when doing water changes. The over flow pipe is just a 1/2" 90° street elbow, a small length of 1/2" pipe, and an unnecessary 1/2" coupling.

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Aeration is still very important.

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To do a water change just dump or siphon water into the bucket ...not too fast though or too many blackworms might get kicked up and some might get lost through the drain.

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The gravel tower doesn't need to be completely filled. The PVC pipe is to weigh down the food so none of it floats.

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Num num.

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Brand new tower and bucket seeded with a small amount of blackworms. I don't add very much food at a time hoping that the blackworms will segment and grow their population quickly as they enter and exit the tower looking for food. 

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Keep the bottom of the bucket clean and bare and after the population grows large enough blackworms can be very easily grabbed off the bottom with your hand after removing food from the tower for a day or two.

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I gathered more wild blackworms not long ago which always comes with pests. Leaches and planaria seem to be attracted to PVC for some reason. Adding a length of pvc pipe makes them easy to remove.

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If you need to store some blackworms and don't necessarily need them to reproduce, add a large wad of hair algae or plant trimmings to a bucket. Expose the plants to only a low amount of light and some plant matter will start decaying fast enough to provide the blackworms with food but slow enough to not foul the water for a few weeks without water changes. Harvesting is also very easy here, especially if using hair algae. Just grab a chunk of plants and shake it inside another container of water.

Aeration has also been unnecessary (probably depending on how many blackworms are in the bucket) while storing the blackworms with plant trimmings as long as the blackworms can climb the plants to get close the the water surface. But if the water starts to foul and a water change isn't done, the blackworms will start crawling inside the over flow pipe.

 

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Wow!  Just, wow!  That's an simple and elegant solution to home blackworm cultivation!

I might try to keep some blackworms again.  You have aeration, but do you use biofiltration?  Do you think it would be beneficial for the setup if the aeration came from a sponge type filter?  How much and how often do you do water changes?  Would you be willing to give step-by-step for your final tower design, and you feeding procedure? 

This is really cool!

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On 1/28/2023 at 4:36 PM, OnlyGenusCaps said:

Wow!  Just, wow!  That's an simple and elegant solution to home blackworm cultivation!

Well thank you. I think this was a year in the making.

On 1/28/2023 at 4:36 PM, OnlyGenusCaps said:

You have aeration, but do you use biofiltration? Do you think it would be beneficial for the setup if the aeration came from a sponge type filter? 

I'm sure the gravel tower has nitrifying bacteria but other than that there's no biofiltration. Although the blackworms might eat the bacteria. I've seen others use a sponge filter in their blackworm cultures but the worms will crawl into the sponge although I'm guessing without the benefit of fragmenting them.

On 1/28/2023 at 4:36 PM, OnlyGenusCaps said:

How much and how often do you do water changes?

I do it by sight mostly. If I'm just walking by, usually every few days, I'll dump a cool whip sized container of water into the bucket. If there's an unusual amount of worms at the top of the tower or if they're trying to crawl up the side of the bucket, I'll siphon in about a gallon of water. If the water starts turning milky white, I'll siphon in two gallons. All depends on how much food I put in there at a time.

That's one more thing I should add the last post. I keep the bucket only half full because otherwise if the water gets too bad, they'll crawl up the side and out the bucket.

On 1/28/2023 at 4:36 PM, OnlyGenusCaps said:

Would you be willing to give step-by-step for your final tower design, and you feeding procedure? 

Sure!

On 1/28/2023 at 4:43 PM, Theplatymaster said:

have you made a blackworm guide that is simpler than this for someone like me that just wants to try it.

I made this.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn77KZ3vhEP/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

 

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Though I have never used blackworms your journey through this adventure has fascinated me. 
I belong to Cichlid Club of York and Aquarium Club of Lancaster county. These are the two clubs that team up to put on The Keystone Clash each year. Every meeting different attempts at cultivating blackworms are discussed yet no one has come up with a version that produces enough yield or is not crazy labor intensive. 
The price of blackworms goes way up each year and being on the East Coast high shipping is dumped on top of it. 
These clubs also team up and place a large order every month and divide up the worms. 
I would like to ask your permission to share this with those clubs on your behalf (full credits to you) to help hundreds of hobbyists that belong to them. If a few folks that have been trying culture them do this it will save both clubs tons of money. 
The clubs do presentations using either a PDF or Word document. 
If you are ok with me passing along this would you have it in either form or mind if one of the club’s sectaries reproduced it in those formats?

Is there a certain temperature range these need done in. 
 

Huge kudos to you and all your hard work and ingenuity! 👏 

 

Edited by Guppysnail
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On 1/29/2023 at 4:54 AM, Guppysnail said:

Every meeting different attempts at cultivating blackworms are discussed yet no one has come up with a version that produces enough yield or is not crazy labor intensive. 

I don't have a clear idea of how fast this produces blackworms. On many occasions I thought most of the blackworms disappeared only to find a tons of them in there a couple weeks later. They might have just been hiding inside the tower. I don't use a ton of blackworms because I don't do much breeding anymore. But one bucket is enough to give all my fish a treat once or twice a week.

Although the best part about these buckets is they take almost no effort. Potted plants love the old water from them too.

On 1/29/2023 at 4:54 AM, Guppysnail said:

I would like to ask your permission to share this with those clubs on your behalf (full credits to you) to help hundreds of hobbyists that belong to them. 

The clubs do presentations using either a PDF or Word document. If you are ok with me passing along this would you have it in either form or mind if one of the club’s sectaries reproduced it in those formats

Of course it's fine if you share. I'm trying to spend a lot less overall time on this stuff so I wouldn't mind if your secretary made a word doc in a format that works for your clubs. Then maybe you can add any questions and point out anything that's not very clear and I can do some editing?

On 1/29/2023 at 4:54 AM, Guppysnail said:

Is there a certain temperature range these need done in. 

Like this a a good question to add. The acceptable temperature range is very wide.

I keep them all outdoors now. Lately the lows have been in the mid 30s°F and they have been doing fine. I imagine they wouldn't like it below freezing but it doesn't usually get that cold here.

I've had them get as high as 95°F maybe 100°F (I'd have to double check). They all came out of the tower and started writhing on the bottom at that temp. They were in a different tank with fish at the time and most got eaten. Idk how long most of them can last at that temperature but after a week long heatwave there were enough survivors to repopulate.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 2/9/2022 at 8:16 AM, modified lung said:

I start biofloc cultures by adding 1/8 tsp of molasses in 1 gal of water. Add an air stone and light and that's it. After about a week, masses of biofloc will grow big enough to start flaking off the side of the jar from the turbulence.

I use this method to culture crazy amounts of daphnia. But daphnia don't need a lot of oxygen and biofloc cultures consume a lot of it.

This is a great thread, but this part about feeding biofloc to daphnia caught my eye.  Can you tell me more about how you do that?

thanks.

 

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On 2/23/2023 at 9:11 AM, memorywrangler said:

This is a great thread, but this part about feeding biofloc to daphnia caught my eye.  Can you tell me more about how you do that?

thanks.

The molasses basically causes a bacteria bloom which is quick easy food for Daphnia.  They can't live on eating bacteria alone though so you need to supplement with greenwater or something else. It's not very sustainable in the long term either. It really only works if you're doing batch cultures where you want to grow the number of Daphnia in a jar quickly and then feed most of them to your fish right away.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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On 3/11/2023 at 1:55 PM, modified lung said:

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What is the purpose of the PVC adapter on the top of the blackworm tower?

Also, I saw that you were covering the outdoor culture tanks in large mesh netting. How do you keep pests and small predators from getting into the blackworm culture? Does it grow mosquitos? I tried an outdoor crayfish tank and ended up with a tremendous number of snails, tadpoles, and also frogs eating the crayfish.

Thanks!

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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.

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On 4/22/2023 at 12:14 AM, modified lung said:

The max holding capacity of a 5 gallon bucket with heavy aeration and no feed seems to be about 30 ounces.

What type of gravel are you using? Have you tried multiple types and picked a favorite? Going to be setting one of these up in short order. Thanks for sharing all of this - my fish will be thanking you 😃

 

Edit: I saw the lava rock / pea gravel comparison. I didn't know what type of pea gravel though - I saw a local place sells different types of pea gravel. And not sure if there are different sizes of pea gravel. Hoping to get it right the first go around. Thanks!

 

Edit 2: This one is probably comparable everywhere. Did you use something like this from Home Depot? It is listed as "Bagged Pea Gravel Pebble Landscape Rock" and says the average rock size is 0.5 in to 1.5 in. I've also seen some called "smooth river rock" which seems to be smoother and rounder than the picture for this item.

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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:PXL_20230427_014123203.jpg.a626ab0d0addded05aa95a946fcc5699.jpg

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: 

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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.

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  • 6 months later...

Sorry to read that man. I’m going to be in the hobby as long as I possibly can. I just set up a 10 gallon with a suspended sponge filter and I will be making a couple of towers as soon as my mesh is delivered. I’ve got a lot of corys and plecos to breed! 

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