I will never again use blackworms

[dw1305]

Vermiculture

Hi all,
Bilbo I'm not too sure about the pure cardboard culture, cardboard is 100% cellulose, so most of the nutrients would have to come from the glue. I'm also not sure about Eisenia foetida as fish food, but my fish love red worms, Lumbricus rubellus.

I had a visit to a commercial worm farmer locally recently, his main crop is potatoes, but any damaged ones small ones etc he uses for vermiculture.
The amount of worms in the vermiculture beds was phenomenal.

I've still got a worm bin (that I feed with dryish vegetable peelings), but it is not particularly prolific. However, I dug the compost out of my garden compost bin last weekend, the bits which had had garden prunings etc had a few worms, but the wet, disgusting, very organic area where I'd been chucking the apple cores, fruit peel and potato peelings, was so full of worms (mainly Red Worms - L. rubellus) that they formed an obvious layer.

Therefore I'm going to try keeping the worm bin wetter and feeding it much more heavily.

cheers Darrel

 

[oldschool]

Darrel,

Great observation there. When I get my culture booming the key is to keep them fed as you have noticed yourself. The more you feed and the more they reproduce the wetter the coir gets which they do not mind at all. For me nothing compares to red worms and they cost nothing to reproduce, I just use my vegetable scraps from the kitchen.

 

[electric eel]

as i said before i got phenominal results feeding flake food(which obviously wasn't free)i usually buy it a couple kilo's at a time and invariably end up with a lot that crumbles up to where its no good for anything but feeding fry anyway.i would be very concerned about dioxin if i was feeding cardboard or scrap paper.you might not get acute poisoning of your fish but chronic (cumulative over a period of time)poisoning might be a definite possibility.you could try a market bilbo.i worked in a grocery when i was in highschool and we always threw a lot of old produce away.they might give it to you

 

[pjrichar]

worms no good

I just lost my male triple red and two male panduro and one female,,, one neon tet hopefully everone else recovers.... jeez....

im back to frozen... for now

boy those blackworms are expensive...... lol

 

[Bilbo]

I just lost my male triple red and two male panduro and one female,,, one neon tet hopefully everone else recovers.... jeez....

im back to frozen... for now

boy those blackworms are expensive...... lol

I am very sorry to hear about your losses. Hopefully they can be replaced but its still sad to loose what sound like lovely fish

 

[Hassles]

Australian Black Worms

http://www.blackworms.com.au/

G'day

I have been reading this thread with great interest and am amazed that blackworms could be lethal to your fish. I feed megre amounts of blackworms (both live & freeze dried) to all of my Apistos. I have had some despiriting experiences using frozen bloodworms and simply do not use bloodworms at all now. I do ocasionally have a batch of backworms 'go off' a bit but these are simply discarded. I have provided the URL above for general interest. I also feed mosquito larvae to my juvenile Apistos and microworms to the fry.

 

[Gillie]

http://www.blackworms.com.au/

G'day

I have been reading this thread with great interest and am amazed that blackworms could be lethal to your fish. I feed megre amounts of blackworms (both live & freeze dried) to all of my Apistos. I have had some despiriting experiences using frozen bloodworms and simply do not use bloodworms at all now. I do ocasionally have a batch of backworms 'go off' a bit but these are simply discarded. I have provided the URL above for general interest. I also feed mosquito larvae to my juvenile Apistos and microworms to the fry.

I was surprised by the loss too, I have been feeding blackworms and keeping them housed the same way for years with no problems. My losses can be attributed only to whatever the worms were carrying. I may in the future try them again but only after being treated for bacteria. For now I rely on my cultures of red wigglers,whiteworms, microworms, daphnia, cyclops, gammarus, bbs and whatever larvae show up in my tubs throughout spring and summer for live food.

 

[Sharpfish]

http://www.blackworms.com.au/

G'day

I have been reading this thread with great interest and am amazed that blackworms could be lethal to your fish. I feed megre amounts of blackworms (both live & freeze dried) to all of my Apistos. I have had some despiriting experiences using frozen bloodworms and simply do not use bloodworms at all now. I do ocasionally have a batch of backworms 'go off' a bit but these are simply discarded. I have provided the URL above for general interest. I also feed mosquito larvae to my juvenile Apistos and microworms to the fry.

Occasionally, problems with frozen food appear when the food thaws and is refrozen repeatedly. The larval flesh can thaw and begin to rot very quickly because their bodies do not have much mass. Then they are refrozen and the rotten flesh is just waiting to be fed to the fish. Each thaw just compounds the problem.