lilFishyfish

Hi I was wondering if anyone breeds and feeds Tubifex Worms to their fish. If so, how do you keep them and how fast do they breed? Is it okay to live them outside in a container? How often do you need to clean the water. Also do they have to be rinsed well before feeding? Also I hear about people saying they are not clean or safe to feed your fish, but so many people do feed them.....? (I'd have to order them) I'm only looking for this option of tubifex worms because I have 3 peacock eels and 2 of them will NOT eat anything thing but live foods and it also has to be the perfect size, not to big not to small. One of them eats frozen bloodworms like crazy, but the other two will not eat anything that isn't live. I have fed them earthworms, but they end up throwing them up (sorry) because they are to big. I've looked into ordering blackworms but I'd have to take a loan out to afford them LOL. Anyhow any help would be great!!!!! THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!

Betta_dude

I dk if people do. But why not google it, or go to ask.com.

Betta_dude

I read tubifex can make fish sick. white worms or blood worms
http://fish.suite101.com/article.cfm..._own_fish_food

caribet

Whether they are good or not to feed fish I don't know but I think they are growing in my tank......

soldieroffortune1974

caribet that looks like you have snails populating a bed of algae. I don't think those are tubifex worms.

soldieroffortune1974

lilfishyfish I googled growing tubifex worms and came across this site:

http://article.discusnews.com/cat-01/freetubifex.shtml

I don't know,I have never tried to cultivate worms of any kind,but I hope that is useful. Looks like you need to find some tubifex worms to start your own "farm" good luck.

cerianthus

It looks like if some one drop the big ball of TF worms. It sure does looks like TB worm to me. If it is it should been devoured by your fish, especially corys.

When TF worm can thrive and multiply like that, it means you may have good amount of decaying organic matters in the gravels.

What i used to do when I was young, used little gadget, worm keeper, to keep them alive and cleaned. Had continuous dripping of cold tap in the basement sink. Always siphoned out excess after feeding and kept them in worm keeper. Can you imagine what would happen to fish when all the worms kick the bucket for whatever reason overnight; high temp, O2 deficiency, etc..?

caribet

yeah i do have a snail problem in there, but what I was trying to show in the picture was the little pink worms sticking out of the gravel. When you disturb the gravel they all shoot under the gravel. When you dig them out you find that they are all bunched up together. The rainbowfish that I have devour them when they are disturbed up into the water column. I don't have any loaches or fish that look for food in the gravel (apart form BN's). I siphoned some of the gravel the other night as I was doing a water change and I ended up sucking up serveral bunches of these worms so I stopped (at this stage I want to keep them). One thing that I did notice was that the dirty water that I siphoned out was a bit different to what I normally get. Instead of being all dark brown and murky, the waste actually remained on the bottom of the bucket soon after the water stopped moving (rather than remaining muddy water looking for quite a while until the sediments eventually when to the bottom). Could the worms be converting all the fish waste etc into a 'soil' type waste like my compost worms do with vegies we put in there

Kirby444

I won't tell you that I am an expert biologist, icthyologist, worm-ologist, or soil ecologist, but I will tell you that to the best of my own understanding "floating" waste is the more toxic, bacteria-laden kind and "sinking" waste is the much more useful and organically rich kind, like aquatic topsoil. If you ever visit a "healthy" (i.e., non-polluted) marsh, and you look at the water, what's it like? GOOD marsh water in a HEALTHY ecosystem is perfectly clear! And what's the water like in pesticide-laden, over-fertilized, stinky, next-to-the-slaughterhouse marsh? It's opaque with floating matter, matter that just won't settle out because it is the same effective "weight" (buoyancy) as the surrounding water. No one ever encourages an aquarist to create or maintain a "properly cloudy, murky, smelly" tank for his or her fish! Clear water is always the goal (and for good reason...). Clear water means that sediment goes to the bottom and toxins get used up or filtered out. And worms, earthworm and their kin especially, do just that: they turn the material they ingest into "castes" which are insoluble and heavy... They sink to the bottom. And if you could feed those castes to your houseplants, they would think they had found their new god.

In other words, congratulations: you have achieved an aquarist's dream.

caribet

Well that is great news then!I guess now the only problem that I have next is that I will be switching my tank some time in the future with a new one. Then I will be back to square one (but at least I will have a colony of tubifex worms to put in there. ) FYI - My tank has a lot of plants in there that do fairly well. I have CO2, PC energy savings bulbs, and a DIY trickle filter (made out of a busted canister filter) and a cannister filter. The fish seem very happy and so am I cause I don't seem to need to change the water too much. Haven't checked the water params for a while. Seems to be in a good balance at the moment.