Harvesting Vinegar Eels

[tolstoy21]

Quick, hopefully easy question . . . .

This is my first foray into vinegar eels (up till now, I've been a microworm guy!) so I need some advice. When you harvest them by putting water in the neck of the bottle and then siphoning the eels out, how long do you let that water sit and collect eels? Few minutes? Few hours? Overnight?

[MickS77]

I usually let it sit overnight knowing I'll want to feed them out the next day. I have 4 bottles I rotate between for feeding. You''ll get some after a couple hours but more than enough if you let it sit longer. You could probably set it in the morning and have enough to feed later at night. 

[Ryan S.]

@MickS77 Probably a dumb question but what do you do after you are done feeding them?  Do you just siphon the water out and put the bottle back on the shelf? 

[Lowells Fish Lab]

So I am both too impatient for the filter floss trick and too paranoid to not rinse live foods. I stumbled across a two pack of reusable k-cups that use small coffee filters. It was the first thing I used to strain and rinse BBS before I got a sieve. I now use it exclusively for rinsing microworms and vinegar eels. I just pour off a little of the VE culture and run it through the filter, rinse with tap water just like BBS, then pull the filter paper out and flop it around in a little cup of tank water. Works for me! The k-cup kit was a few bucks and came with a bunch of filters. I reuse the filter papers for a long time too. As long as they are rinsed they don't really break down.

 

[tolstoy21]

5 hours ago, MickS77 said:

I usually let it sit overnight knowing I'll want to feed them out the next day. I have 4 bottles I rotate between for feeding. You''ll get some after a couple hours but more than enough if you let it sit longer. You could probably set it in the morning and have enough to feed later at night. 

Thanks! That's what I've been doing, but then i wondered is vinegar eels have a limited life span in the fresh water over night, or if they go back down in the vinegar solution as needed, or if it just didn't matter.

[tolstoy21]

1 hour ago, Ryan S. said:

@MickS77 Probably a dumb question but what do you do after you are done feeding them?  Do you just siphon the water out and put the bottle back on the shelf? 

I've just been sucking out the 'fresh' water with the worms in it with a pipette and feeding from that. (Well, first I dilute that by squirting it into a cup of tank water). This way, I'm approximately taking out the volume of water I've added, give or take.

[Fish Folk]

We just suck off 10 ml. from the surface of the vinegar culture (eels tend to stay up around the edge). Then squirt that into a ca. 10 oz. mug of fresh water. Then we add a bit of Baking Soda to counteract the acidity. Let that sit for a few minutes under light until the eels all come up to the surface, and feed that. It works alright if fry are in a fairly large environment -- a tank of ca. 5-10 gallons. When they're in a small, isolated, 1/2 gallon fry bin sometimes the chemistry goes awry. 

Here's a video with some vinegar eel feeding...

 

Edited February 10, 2021 by Fish Folk
video added