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‘ello all! My Parosphromenus ‘sentang’ are still doing well, with one of the five juvies showing what looked like flashing Friday. Anyhow…they are currently being fed bbs and microworms only. Some goofs on my part crashed my grindal cultures months ago, and they have yet to fully recover….they are growing on my peat moss cultures and being fed dog food, but they are growing slowly. What have you found to work well for grindals? Also, how do you harvest them from peat moss or any other dirt like substrate? (Prior to the peat moss they were on sponges…the aforementioned goof was trying to move those thriving cultures to newer sponges). Thankx!
Hello Josh,
first of all you should be aware, that no matter how widely used, dog food or cat food, or any food containing fats of warmblooded animals is really wrong. The reason is simple, these fats are not apropriate for fish. Fish need fats that are liquid within their range of temperature and those that contain the right forms of fat useful for their organism. For this reason, white worms and grindal worms are known to have to much fat and are used only sparingly by experienced aquarists. The “too much fat” thing is not actually the problem, the problem is too much of bad fats as since people started to use them , they were cultivated on food contaning milk fat (oats and milk was the first food used for these). In fact you can prepare high quality food yourself using instant oat flour and skimmed (no fat) dried milk powder in 3:1 (w/w) ratio. Either use it as powder or add a little water to form little drops, so that you are able to remove these and add fresh food on regular basis. You need to the worms to have quality nutrition, as the substances they contain is what you feed to your fish. I can post some more complex formulas for food cultivation later, but this one is way better for the fish and easy to prepare.
[quote=”Deepin peat” post=5898]Hello Josh,
first of all you should be aware, that no matter how widely used, dog food or cat food, or any food containing fats of warmblooded animals is really wrong. The reason is simple, these fats are not apropriate for fish. Fish need fats that are liquid within their range of temperature and those that contain the right forms of fat useful for their organism. For this reason, white worms and grindal worms are known to have to much fat and are used only sparingly by experienced aquarists. The “too much fat” thing is not actually the problem, the problem is too much of bad fats as since people started to use them , they were cultivated on food contaning milk fat (oats and milk was the first food used for these). In fact you can prepare high quality food yourself using instant oat flour and skimmed (no fat) dried milk powder in 3:1 (w/w) ratio. Either use it as powder or add a little water to form little drops, so that you are able to remove these and add fresh food on regular basis. You need to the worms to have qulity nutrition, as the substances they contain is what you feed to you fish. I can post some more complex formulas for food cultivation later, but this one is way better for the fish and easy to prepare.[/quote]
Better start looking for oat flour and dried milk powder then…thankx!
Anyhow…what substrate worked well for you? And how did you harvest the worms off the substrate?
Josh make sure to get yourself extruded type of flour. I thought all instant flour should be extruded by default, but it turns out they are not, or at least not to the same extent. Extruded one is important as the fats in the flour oxidize quickly under normal circumstances, but extruded stuff will not, because of the starch covering the particles during the proces and so protecting them.
Also set your cultures according to the picture. These are white worms, but the principle works for both. There is a plastic net covered by a piece of glass. To get clear worms, you only put the food on the glass, so that they have to leave the substrate to feed. This way, you are able to collect worms only + they are encapsulated with their food. You will still need to rinse them, but no cocopeat particles anymore…
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