Cleaning White Worms Before Feeding

[Andrew C]

I used to feed white worms to my fish, which they loved, but ended up with a copepod infestation in my six foot tank, which in the end i managed to get rid of by stripping the tank down, throwing out any decor & filter material, and then drying out the tank and two cannister filters for a few weeks, which got rid of them, as copepods need water or at least somewhere damp to live.
At the time i did not know the perils of feeding live food to your fish, but all my fish loved them, and have ordered a starter culture to try them again.

If you use white worms have you had trouble with copepods/planarians in your cultures and what you do if you find any in your live food cultures ?
Just throw them out and start again ?

To clean the worms before feeding, i can only think of using a large gauge sieve (to hold the worms and let small things through) to hold the white worms in while pouring tank water over them in the sink, to clean unwanted critters off the worms, before putting them in the tank.
Is there a better way to clean white worms before putting them in the tank ?

Hope you can help

 

[retro_gk]

White worms? The kind you culture on coconut fiber or similar and feed oatmeal to? I've been feeding them to my fish for years and never had issues with anything other than worms in the culture.

I use microscope slides to collect the worms on and just swish them in the tank.

 

[tjudy]

What kind of copepods? I keep my whiteworms pretty dry I guess. I do not see how an aquatic copepod could survive in the culture, or where they would come from to begin with. I do have copepods in a few tanks, but they do not seem to be harming anything (but ther eare many types of copepods, so maybe I have a relatively harmless species). I am pretty sure mine came from plants I picked up as a swap.. along with burrowing snails... grrrr.

I have started using a piece of plastic screen on top of my worm cultures. The food is placed on top of the screen and a tile is placed over the food. The worms come through the screen to get to the food and leave the dirt behind them. I lift the tile and can pinch up gobs of worms.

 

[Andrew C]

The white worms i am talking about need cooler temperatures (hard to keep live in the summer), and are kept in tub with garden soil and i usually feed them using a small piece of bread with some milk on it to dampen it.

 

[Andrew C]

Hello Ted
It is a while since i have used white worms and used to feed them to my zebra plecs but they were thriving on the high protein homemade food i fed my zebra plecs with.
The copepods were in my other tanks but did not thrive like they did in the zebra tank.

I talked to another fish keeper and after describing what was in my tank while using a magnifying glass, he sent me this picture saying what they were and how they moved, and it definetly looked like them, and they moved how he had described them.
Harpacticoid Copepod !
He told me they are harmless and that they can be found in lots of tanks in the background, never usually multiplying in tanks, some fish will eat them, but not in large numbers, and can even be introduced to a tank through live plants.

I kept the 6ft tank going a bit longer without any fish in it before i stripped it down to see if i could find anything that killed them, but could not find anything that would kill them 100%.
As the copepods were multiplying too well in the two external cannister filters on this tank, and must have been thriving on the protein rich homemade food i was feeding my zebras.

The big pile (4 inchs in size) is dead & alive copepods and also gunk from the cleaned out external filter, after treating the tank with lots of salt and three bottles of Hydrogen Peroxide solution.
***No Fish Were Present***

They are the small white dots around the edge of the slate i used to cover my white worms with, this picture is when i first realised i was introducing something extra into my tanks while feeding live white worms.

 

[STOKER]

White worms ??

Hi Andrew


Was told years ago that the white specks are eggs and that the "bugs' are worm babies and not to worry about them
But this could have been a 1st APRIL story


Mike

 

[fishgeek]

organophosphates and more recently ivermectin have been used for treating ectoparasitic copepods
both these drugs can be quite toxic to fish aswell though

i hvae no issues with feeding live dirty worms to my fish
so my white worm feeding inevitably involves some dirt from the culture box

the white circles i too have heard are egg's whether they be worm or springtail egg's i am not sure but i feed then to the fish anyway

 

[tjudy]

I get springtails in my older worm cultures, and in my grindal worms I get a critter that looks like an aphid (but it is not) that is smaller than a springtail and seems to live on top of the slate over the worms rather than under it. When I dip the slate they float onthe surface of the tank. Most of my smaller rainbows and tetras eat them off the surface, so I do not worry about them.

That copepod infestation you are describing is far worse than anythign I experience. Some copepods have some nasty spikes on them that small fish cannot handle, so they are in effect inedible.

I have an interesting mollusc that showed up with some riccia I picked up at a club meeting. It they grow no larger then I would describe them as a 'nano-limpet'. Right now they have a flat, oval shell that is about 1 mm long and .75mm wide with a thickness of .5 mm or less. I first saw them as white spots on the glass, but they were hard to the touch and squashed like a snail. Then I saw them in profile and realized they were more limpet-like than snail-like, so I have let them live to see if they grow.

 

[Andrew C]

Thanks for the replies.
It was my 6ft tank with two cannister filters that the copepods thrived in.
Generally keep their tank bare bottom as zebras are finiky eaters (apart from the white worms) and i like to make sure food is getting eaten, which is easier with a bare bottom tank, plus with a bare bottom tank you can spot anything out of the ordinary as well, such as small white things scurring about.

I used to feed them before lights out and sometimes food was still there in the morning, which then was removed.
It must have been the high protein homemade food that i fed my zebras with that got the copepods thriving in the cannister filters, the homemade food contained; Mainly frozen Prawns, frozen Crab meat, frozen Mussles, sometimes some frozen fish, flake food, spinach, peas, carrott, cucumber, garlic, Spirulina and some Zoe Multi Vitamins, blended together and frozen.

My four other tanks also had copepods in them, around a dozen in each one, but they never reached the extremes of the six foot tank over the same period of time.

So basically, i will end transfering something into my tanks feeding white worms, and i am better to just feed white worms to my other fish and stick to the home made food for the zebras, as any critters in the zebra tank have a chance of breeding because of the high protein food and external cannister filters to thrive in.

 

[Andrew C]

Flipping white worms !
I have two large tubs with recently added white worm starter cultures maturing in my hut, and had noticed the odd fruit fly when renewing it's food every couple of days, just kept picking the flies out and flushing them down the drain, but now one of the cultures has an infestation of fruit flies !

When i went to renew the cultures food, i noticed six or seven small flies flying around the culture, swated them, and then lifted the carboard off that was covering the cultures and keeping them dark.
There was loads of fruit flies crawling over the lid, had to run outside with the culture, shake it and then open the tub to get rid of the ones inside.
Thank goodness this happened in my fish hut and not in my house, still squatting the flies in the hut !

The cultures have been moved to the garden tool shed and with the cold temperatures around here just now, the fruit flies should not multiply so readily.
The only reason i have not thrown them out is i am going to try culturing white worms in scrubber pads, as detailed on http://fins.actwin.com/killietalk/month.200312/msg00130.html
The worms will be well cleaned before seeding the culture with them.

Has anybody tried using artifical media for their white worm cultures and how did you find it ?
The layers of scrubbers seem easier to maintain once established, and if you have an infestation of any other bug, it looks better for just replacing some of the scrubbers, rather than throwing the whole lot out and starting again ?

The worst bit is i am trying to culture some wingless fruit flies, which do not seem to be doing well, but it has only been a week for the culture, while my white worm cultures are producing loads of winged fruit flies