Raising Worms for Fish Food
White Worms are Cheap and Easy to Culture for Feeding Tropical Fish
Learn how you can raise live white worms for feeding your aquarium fish. It is simple to do and very inexpensive.
Fish require protein in their diet because it is essential for maintaining their muscle tissue and for keeping up a high energy level. White worms, Enchytraeus albidus, are an excellent source of protein and can be cultured at home for an extremely low cost. They grow from around ½ inch to 1 inch long and contain approximately 80% protein.
Benefits of a White Worm Culture
White worms are a great food to use in stimulating fish into the breeding mode because of the high protein level. It’s also great for feeding to fry because it helps them grow faster and small fish can handle the size of a white worm. If you are aware of other live foods, white worms are smaller than tubiflex worms but larger than grindal worms in size.
White worms are easy to culture and keep, the hardest part is to find someone who is selling a starter white worm culture. Check around with the people that use white worms for feed and see if you can purchase a culture from them. They may be available in stores but not in abundance. The price of a culture is usually between $5 to $10 dollars.
Starting a White Worm Culture
- Use a margarine container (or a plastic container of similar size) with lid.
- Put a few holes in the lid to let air pass through. Fill the container ½ full with peat moss and then put in a piece of bread soaked in milk on top. You can add a piece of lettuce in order to easily remove the worms when needed. When the bread becomes spotted with mould, remove the spots with a spoon and replace with dry bread crumbs.
- Place put your worm culture on top of the base you have created. The worms will mix through the bread and peat and become an established culture. Wait at least 4 days before using the worms. This allows them to start the reproduction process.
- Pick out worms from your culture to feed your fish. Use approximately 3 to 5 worms per fish.
If you choose not to add milk soaked bread, you will have to soak the peat until it is completely saturated and use other foods for the worms such as bread crumbs, dry fish food or veggies. Using this method does not always bring good results.
Maintaining A White Worm Culture
As your culture becomes more mature, create another one. Take out half of the peat moss with the worms and put into a new container. Add more peat moss to both containers topping them up to ½ again. Moisten the new peat moss and add more milk soaked bread.
Continue to add food to the culture because the worms will die without it. If you overcrowd your culture, the worms will die because they don’t have room to move. Keeping the worms in a dark and cool place can slow down their growth.
If you find you have too many worms, you can release them into an outdoor compost box or in a moist area such as a river bank or creek bed. You can also sell a culture to other people in order to help them get started.
As you can see, it is easy and inexpensive to maintain a culture of white worms. Not only are you saving money by not buying frozen or dried worms at a pet store, you are providing your fish with the necessary protein for good health.
