Culturing live foods...

[AbbeysDad]

For years and years I depended on quality commercial fish foods (like Omega One Tropical FLakes) with the occasional frozen treats (like frozen brine shrimp). Then two things happened.
1) I began growing out 100+ swordtails. At around $2.50 per ounce, and lots of hungry fish, it adds up. And...
2) I setup an outdoor tank this spring/summer which led to tubs of daphnia as well as harvesting mosquito larvae.

Fish just go nuts for live foods...you drop some in and it's like a school of piranha!

So now, in addition to daphnia magna, I'm culturing white worms, micro worms, and grindal worms for the fish and redworms for the turtles...(and I'll continue to seasonally collect mosquito larvae and bloodworms as available).

Now I still believe we want/need a staple QUALITY commercial food to ensure the best possible health, but sustainable live foods provide a diversity, a relished treat, and a reduction in store bought fish food costs.

Anyone else culturing live foods?

 

[The Lumpfish Guy]

Anyone else culturing live foods?

I don't at the moment due to current house restrictions, but I have done Algae (marine), Artemia, Copepods and Rotifers and snails for the puffers, before. I have never really tried worms ect.

 

[Colin_T]

Microworms and Grindal worms are easy to culture. Use oatmeal for the micros and peat moss for the grindals. Feed the grindals on dry baby cereal and the micros will eat the porridge.
There's more detailed info on culturing microworms at the following link.
http://www.fishforums.net/threads/back-to-basics-when-breeding-fish.448304/

Get yourself an earthworm farm from a hardware and feed them food scraps and lawn clippings. Earthworms make great food for bigger catfish and cichlids.

Aphids were on my list of live foods but only popped up a few times a year. I had a few roses and they would get covered in aphids so I would run around and tap them into a bucket and feed them to the fish.

Weevil moths and larvae are easy to culture in plastic rubbish bins with flour or grains (rice, corn, bird seed) in. Flour was the easiest to culture them in and I used a sieve to separate the weevils from the flour. The flour lasts for years and produces weevils for most of that time.

Wingless fruit flies are available from lab supply stores or universities. Keep them in glass or plastic jars and feed them with fruit.

Maggots can be collected by hanging a piece of meat above a tray of bran. Cover the meat and bran in a cage to stop the dog getting it. The maggots fall off the meat and crawl around the bran. After a couple of days in bran they are quite clean and can be fed to fish.

You can feed ants and ant eggs.

Baby guppies and other livebearers make good food if you don't mind feeding them to other fish.

You can grow glass/ ghost shrimp in heavily planted tanks and put them in the main tank for fish food.

Newly hatched brineshrimp make a great food for any fish less than 4 inches long. There is info on hatching eggs at the link for microworms.