I certainly learned my lesson. My fish usually get a mix of grindal worms, white worms, and brine shrimp naupliae that I culture myself, plus the black worms I occasionally get from the shop. I can’t keep things outside (my land lady does a lot of gardening), otherwise I would culture mosquito larvae and daphnia. Sometimes I get daphnia from my friend’s cultures when I visit though 🙂
I keep the black worms in a shallow dish of water and actually feed them with Vita-Chem for a week with daily water changes before I start feeding them to my fish. Ever since I started doing that, the black worms stay very healthy. In comparison to white worms and grindal worms, the black worms do much better getting my fish into final spawning condition for some reason. They are definitely only a very small part of the diet though, maybe 2x week. They are too fattening otherwise.
I will definitely not be doing deworming on them again! I should have realized that the risk of disease in such water conditions would be low. I will probably drop it altogether since I’ve never had problems with intestinal parasites anyways 🙁
Still feel sick :sick: