Worms as food

[paul b]

Worms, I love worms and if it were not for worms I would not have this hobby, thats how much I rely on worms(although I never tasted them myself)

I use two types of worms for food, California Blackworms and lately, white worms. Blackworms are fresh water worms and white worms live in wet soil. Blackworms only live for about 15 seconds in saltwater but my fish eat them very fast so they never make it to the bottom. Whiteworms are smaller and live for a few hours in saltwater.

Through experience I have realized that fish that are in excellent health do two things, they spawn and they don't get sick. So if a fish is not spawning or exhibiting spawning tendancies, it is not that healthy and is suseptable to a vast assortment of maladies including ich. ( just see how many ich threads there are) A fishes immune system is much different than ours and fish make antibodies in a few different places in their body, one place is in their slime secreting glands. We sweat, fish exude slime. The slimier fish such as mandarins and eels are more disease resistant than less slimier fish such as tangs. More slime equals more antibodies.

Anyway, to get a fish into spawning condition is not simply to have them spawn so we can raise the fry. My fish spawn frequently and I have not raised any babies in many years but the fact that the fish are spawning is an indicator that the fish are in the best shape they will even be in.

I don't want this to be a discussion on ich or diseases, as that has been done to death and if you don't believe that spawning fish don't hardly get sick, start a new thread titled "Paul B thinks that if your fish are spawning, you have to step on them to kill them" or something like that.

Back to worms. Worms for some reason greatly aid the fish into getting into breeding condition. Why? I have no idea, but when I used to raise freshwater fish fifty years ago, blackworms are what I used to get the fish into condition. When I got my first saltwater fish in 1971 I also used live worms and I had blue devils spawning every few weeks for seven years, and that was before most people even knew salt water fish could be kept at home. Some fish will live for many years on flakes and pellets and some, such as clownfish and some other damsels will even spawn but for most fish a more nutritious diet is needed.

I realize that flakes today are better than many years ago but flakes are baked to dry them. Anything dry can not have the nutrition of moist food because many vitamins do not take to drying and the oils that I feel are the most important are lost during the drying process. There is also a reason that flake food, or any dry food lasts for months, there is not much to go bad in them. White flour can be kept forever for the same reason which is the reason it is always fortified with vitamins and minerals, if it were not fortified, it can not be called food because it is just paste. Think about that.

A fish is a cold blooded animal and like all cold blooded animals can go for long periods of time with no food. They don't waste calories as we do just trying to keep our body temperatures warm. Fish don't have to because the ocean where they live is already at the perfect temperature for them. We move around a lot in different temperature locations so our body has to regulate our internal temperature for us and that takes up most of the calories we eat. A large fish such as a shark can go almost a year without food.

Live worms (or live fish) supply the freshest assortment of nutrients that our fish need to not only live, but to spawn. Live saltwater fish are the best food but are not available to us as a fish food but the next best thing is live worms. When a fish produces eggs (as "all" healthy female fish do) the fish needs much more calories than it does when it is just living. If you have ever filleted a pregnant fish, you will see that the eggs can be half the weight or more of the fish. To produce these eggs the fish needs more nutrition, much more and in the correct proportions of fats and proteins. Fish egggs are mostly oil and it takes a lot of calories and fat to produce all that oil. This is a huge burden on a fish but in the sea they have plenty of fresh food and they eat it all day, not just in the morning or whenever we decide to feed them.

Also live foods provide nutrients that they can't put in dry foods because much of those nutrients are constantly produced by a living body and used up by that body.

I use live blackworms every day along with clams and mysis to feed my fish. Virtually all of my fish are spawning except my copperband butterfly, one watchman gobi that doesn't have a mate, a cardinal without a mate as I have five of them and the pairs are spawning and my Shrimp gobies as one of them is very young.

The rest of my 20 or so fish are spawning and disease free. Along with my mandarins even my 19 year old fireclowns are spawning. These fish have never had any diseases including ich and I add fish from the sea along with bacteria in the form of mud, seaweed, amphipods, copepods and anything I consider interesting.

I am not talking about being disease free for a year or two, I am talking over 30 years.

Recently I have added whiteworms to the menu as a test. I bought a starter culture a few weeks ago on line and now I have millions of the little suckers. I keep them in a plastic shoebox in potting soil and feed them matzo's. I am not Jewish and am not sure if my worms are but I find Matzo's great at raising worms, but they will eat just about anything including crackers, cheerios, bread, Alpo SPAM, linguini and clams, hamburger helper etc. I use Matzo's because I can lay it flat on the soil and I like to add a few drops of fish oil to them. (I try to get fish oil into anything I feed) In 2 days the worms will eat a 2"X2" piece of Matzo (or cracker) with fish oil on it.

When the cracker is almost completely finished there are so many worms on it that you can't see any cracker. I remove those small pieces and put them in a little fresh water and stir it up. The worms do a little Macarana dance and seperate from the cracker and I can remove the piece of cracker and just have worms.

Those worms are tiny, less than 1/4" and very skinny. My copperband and most of my fish can't even see them which is what I want because the copperband and other larger fish are busy eating the larger live blackworms so the white worms fall to the substrait where they do that macarana dance again attracting my smaller fish such as mandarins. My mandarins are normally fed live baby brine shrimp and they are spawning so they don't really need the extra nutrition but I just love to see the smile on their faces when they see tiny live worms.

My mandarins are so happy that when they think I am not looking even they start doing that Macarana dance , a short video

Edited April 18, 2013 by paul b

[matt]

Can you talk a bit about your source for starting your cultures of both white and black worms?

[paul b]

I just Googled White Worm cultures and got this.http://www.worm-cultures.com/whiteworminformation.htm

 

I don't think this is the one where I got them, but worms are worms. The blackworms I just buy at an LFS but you can get them online. The problem with getting them online is that you have to buy a lot of them and if you didn't make a worm keeper, you need to keep them in a refrigerator and they won't last long. Maybe two weeks and gradually they die. I built a worm keeper which is just a tank with some circulation water and some carbon with a way to keep the worms out of the pump. This one uses a trough as the worms like moving shallow water. Not in this picture is a small carbon container and a small container the pump sits in to keep worms out as they don't swim.

Edited April 18, 2013 by paul b

[mling]

I read somewhere that you should only feed marine fishes marine life food versus fresh water live food. To that end, I've not fed my Lion fresh water feeder fishes.

 

What are your thoughts on that since I think the worms you refer to are not marine based, correct ?

 

Would freezed dried worms, while not as beneficial, suffice if you can't get live ones ?

[paul b]

I read somewhere that you should only feed marine fishes marine life food versus fresh water live food. To that end, I've not fed my Lion fresh water feeder fishes.

 

What are your thoughts on that since I think the worms you refer to are not marine based, correct ?

 

Would freezed dried worms, while not as beneficial, suffice if you can't get live ones ?

I would not feed saltwater fish with freshwater fish either as the oils are different, but worms for some reason do not matter, although saltwater worms may be better, I really don't know. But I do know as I said that I have been feeding these worms for fifty years and I have bred many fresh and salt water fish. My fish do not get sick, I don't have to quarantine and have not in almost 30 years, almost all of my fish are spawning and some are almost 20 years old. My mandarins and bluestriped pipefish are also spawning and many people consider them hard just to keep alive. My last Moorish Idol I killed by accident after five years which stinks but is almost a record for a Moorish Idol. My fish generally die either by jumping out or old age. Some I give away if they get to large or mean but they never, yes never die of disease. I have been on these forums for many years and never posted a sick fish thread (I don't think so anyway) I take fish and crustaceans from the sea almost every week in the summer along with some mud and just put it in my tank and have always done this. But I feel "not" feeding live foods is the biggest problem in this hobby and is the sole reason for all the disease threads. I may be wrong but I doubt it is my UG filter keeping my fish living for so long. Many people tell me my tank is a time bomb and ich will kill everything one day. Maybe it will but even if it does, I have had some run don't you think?

[paul b]

I forgot the freeze dried worms, no I would not use them

[mling]

So does anyone know of a LFS in N Va that has live worms ?

[countryboy]

Very interesting, good to learn from someone who's been in it so long. I have always read and been told blackworms have no nutritional value. I started feeding blackworms a couple of weeks ago after reading your post and my fish go crazy for them along with the chopped up shrimp I feed.

[smallreef]

I don't know who has them...also look for fishing stores that carry bait...they usually have black worms...

Edited April 19, 2013 by smallreef

[GraffitiSpotCorals]

I would guess having an very well established aquarium also helps the fish fight off anything just as much as what your feeding. I would like to know exactly what diseases or parasites or sicknesses the fish can fight off if you just feed them blackworms. Someone with a new tank can't just go out buying tangs and toss them in their tank without having a high percentage chance of having ich blow up, even if they feed blackworms. How often are you adding new fish and how do you go about choosing one to add to your tank? My fish never really made much of a deal over blackworms. I have tried lots of times but most get cought in my acros and sucked down the overflow. Then the rest die in the fridge. I think I feed them well enough, the foreign looking objects don't really appeal to them? I dunno...

[GraffitiSpotCorals]

Mling Centerville keeps them most of the time.

[paul b]

Very interesting, good to learn from someone who's been in it so long. I have always read and been told blackworms have no nutritional value.

 

Have you also been told that a Reverse Undergravel filter can't possably be used in a reef tank?

 

I would guess having an very well established aquarium also helps the fish fight off anything just as much as what your feeding. I would like to know exactly what diseases or parasites or sicknesses the fish can fight off if you just feed them blackworms. Someone with a new tank can't just go out buying tangs and toss them in their tank without having a high percentage chance of having ich blow up, even if they feed blackworms. How often are you adding new fish and how do you go about choosing one to add to your tank? My fish never really made much of a deal over blackworms. I have tried lots of times but most get cought in my acros and sucked down the overflow. Then the rest die in the fridge. I think I feed them well enough, the foreign looking objects don't really appeal to them? I dunno...

 

There are many factors that go into keeping a fish in breeding condition. Fish in the sea are always in excellent condition but when we put them in a tank and start feeding them things like flakes they lose the ability to fight off disease and paracites.

All we have to do is to keep them in great condition. In the sea fish eat only fresh seafoods, not just shrimp tails, squid tentacles or scallop muscles. In the sea they eat complete animals including the guts, scales, eyes, and bones. Shrimp tails and squid tentacles are only protein with all the important nutrients missing. If we feed something whole like a complete worm our fish are getting the guts as well as what the worm had for it's last meal. I also feed clams. I take a whole calm and freeze it, then I shave off paper thin slices which contain all of the nuterients of that filter feeding clam. I do not put it in a blender as this will lose much of the important oils and just make a mess. The other things I feed every day are live newborn brine shrimp and frozen mysis. That is all I feed. I am just an aquarist like everyone here and I don't know the magic bullet, but I have been doing this a while and I don't think it is my UG filter or my good looks, although that probably plays a part. I do add bacteria in the form of mud from the sea and I also use some NSW, maybe 20 gallons a year as it is heavy.

So I don't know why my fish never get sick and I don't have to quarantine but I think it is the whole foods I feed. As I said, In 1971 when I started my tank I bought 7 blue devils and at the time there was no salt water food so I fed them flakes and they lived fine. But after a while I started feeding them live blackworms and in a week one of the blue devils fins turned blue like the rest of his body. The other 6 of them remained with clear fins. The one whos'e fins turned blue grew a little larger and was a male. the rest were females. They started to spawn and continued to spawn for 6 more years. And that was in 1971.

That is when I started to feed live worms to my fish and since then, always have.

Of course you can't feed a tang blackworms and throw it in your tank and expect him to be disease free. It takes a while for all the inhabitants of the tank to get in breeding condition but everything else has to be optimum also. The tank has to be aged and not to sterile. I hate sterile tanks and find them so unhealthy. To me a healthy tank is full of life under every rock, nook and cranny I want to wsee something crawling, slithering or watching TV.

This is my experience, do with it as you want. But most of the threads on this and all forums have to do with diseases. I never posted a disease thread. If anyone has another explanation I would love to learn about it.

This is one of those first blue devils over his nest of eggs in that gooseneck barnacle.

[sachabballi reef]

Paul my fish all love the frozen blood worms...which I feed often with other frozen foods. Am I wasting my time with them or is there some nutritional value in them even though they are frozen?

[paul b]

I would like to know exactly what diseases or parasites or sicknesses the fish can fight off if you just feed them blackworms. How often are you adding new fish and how do you go about choosing one to add to your tank? My fish never really made much of a deal over blackworms. I have tried lots of times but most get cought in my acros and sucked down the overflow. Then the rest die in the fridge.

 

We as humans get shots for diseases and we don't contract those diseases. When I was in the jungles of Viet Nam for a year I had to take a malaria pill every day and a different one on mondays. If you got malaria, you got court marshalled because that meant you didn't take the pill. The Vietnamese people didn't take pills and there were certainly plenty of them that never got malaria. Why is that? The mosquetoes bit them I am sure.

What happened is that those people built up an immunity over their entire lifetime and they constantly got bit and that kept their immunity up. Does anyone disagree with that? Malaria paracites are much like ich and the same medication kills it. Quinicrine hydrocloride which is what I mix with copper if I need to cure it in a store or someplace else.

 

I rarely get sick, not even a cold but the two times I went to Mexico I got real sick and once ended up in the hospital. The Mexican people don't go to the hospital and I am sure they drink the water. Why is that? Do you see a pattern here?

There has to be ich in my tank. I buy fish from anywhere and even collect them. A few weeks ago I bought a copperband butterfly in a LFS for $10.00 and it definately had ich. I put him in copper for a few days because he was so infected that I didn't think he would survive in my tank, then I put him in my reef. My old copperband beat him up so I caught him and gave himaway. He is doing fine in another member's tank on another forum but I am sure people on here read all about when I gave him away as I posted pictures. The rest of my fish don't have ich. How could them, some are 19 years old. So it is my opinion that while ich is in my tank, all the fish are immune. Sick fish do not spawn and almost all my fish are spawning and living longer thqan some members here. Anyone have any explanations? I am told my tank is a time bomb because I don't quarantine. Maybe it is but it has had some run. So I hate to say this but ich is what keeps ich from infecting my fish. I won't say how you go about getting your fish immune but immunity is much healthier for fish that worrying about everything you put in your tank.

People call me radical, Old school, and bald. I am all of those things but especially bald.

This is that little copperband that was covered in ich a few days after I cured him.

 

 

This is him after my old copperband beat him up. The top picture is 3 days later after he was fed nothing bur worms a few times a day. His fins are completely healed.

 

[paul b]

Paul my fish all love the frozen blood worms...which I feed often with other frozen foods. Am I wasting my time with them or is there some nutritional value in them even though they are frozen?

 

You are wasting your time with them as bloodworms are not worms at all but insect larvae and should not be fed to saltwater fish.

 

You would be much better with clams or even mysis but the problem with mysis is that they are mostly indigestable shell which is not calcium so they get a lot of bulk but not a lot of nutrition. They are much better than what you feed but I would give them clams or of course worms.

[sachabballi reef]

yes they get mysis and enriched brine etc....they seem to really love the blood worms so I guess I will try to find some black worms locally.....are they easy to keep?

[paul b]

yes they get mysis and enriched brine etc....they seem to really love the blood worms so I guess I will try to find some black worms locally.....are they easy to keep?

Not really unless you make a worm keeper like I did or you can keep them in the fridge but I don't like that method and my wife exercizes every day and I am afraid of her.

[sachabballi reef]

oh thats cool...i have a spare fridge in the garage I can use....how long will they last in the garage?

[paul b]

I know people keep them longer than 2 weeks in a fridge, You have to rinse them daily with cold fresh water. Tap water is fine. Remember I don't want to give the impression that you can feed worms for 2 weeks and all your problems are over. That is not the case. You have to fed properly for a while, maybe a month or two along with keeping the rest of the circumstances good. Worms are not an antibiotic or magic pill but they are to be used as a step to getting fish in breeding condition which should get their immune systems working properly, but it doesn't happen overnight and it won't happen at all in some tanks that have other unhealthy practices. Also if you quarantine, I would keep quarantining unless you have my tank or a lot of experience. I don't want to convince anyone to stop quarantining, this feeding is just what I do and I am trying to convey my experiences.

Edited April 19, 2013 by paul b

[sachabballi reef]

thanks paul, you are always a source of such interesting information

[paul b]

thanks paul, you are always a source of such interesting information

 

I try to be interesting, thats why I grew two heads and 3 eyes and have hairy knees.

[mling]

Not really unless you make a worm keeper like I did or you can keep them in the fridge but I don't like that method and my wife exercizes every day and I am afraid of her.

 

Worm keeper ? What is involved with that ? My wife exercises too but so do I Actually, she is the one always wanting to get live food for the fishes.

[sachabballi reef]

my husband knows better to get in the way of my tanks LOL....well, he doesn't know about a lot of it...but he knows better when he finally finds out about it

besides if he is going to go into the fridge in the garage that means he is actually cooking or something....so I would trade the black worms in that situation....I could have a whole farm in there and he will never know LOL

[paul b]

I have posted this many times, it is just a way to get water to flow over the worms and a way to keep the worms out of the pump. The tiny powerhead is in a small container in the tank with holes near the top because worms don't swim they don't get sucked into the pump. The water flows to the left side of the trough and goes back into the tank. There is a small carbon chamber (not in this picture) that the water goes through. The worms are fed pieces of paper towels or brown paper bags, cheap date.

 

[worm5406]

Well being an army man you have a good setup!