Mosquito larvae

[sharkweek178]

We all know that fish love them. And it's that time of year. So what are your tips and tricks for cultivating them?

I have a couple plastic bins going. I started them with a mesh bag full of grass clippings. But now the water is so green that it probably isn't necessary. I might be harvesting too frequently. I had one harvest that got me so many that I had plenty left over for freezing. Haven't had any as good this season. My most recent got some bloodworms and I saw the teeny tiny mosquito larvae. But no good sized larvae. Maybe if I give it a few more days in between harvests, I'll get better results. But, OTOH, I don't want any maturing to adulthood.

 

[GaryE]

I check every day, and don't get many. Yet. You can overharvest Daphnia, but mosquitoes are gifts from above. It's not like you'll harvest your breeders... The pattern here has been lots of mosquitoes in August. I hope I only see them in cultures - airborne ones were nasty last year, and absent the year before.

 

[sharkweek178]

I check every day, and don't get many. Yet. You can overharvest Daphnia, but mosquitoes are gifts from above. It's not like you'll harvest your breeders... The pattern here has been lots of mosquitoes in August. I hope I only see them in cultures - airborne ones were nasty last year, and absent the year before.

I check every few days. I usually get a nice little batch. I'm thinking of putting out another bin of water so I can have extras that I can freeze.
I also realized that I've created a nice supply of green water for when I start culturing daphnia.

 

[sharkweek178]

Most of the water had evaporated out of my bins. So I started over and refilled them with fresh water. I did a little experiment. One of them, the larger one, I put in a mesh bag with grass clippings and an apple core. The other one I poured in a little milk.
They both produced larvae pretty quickly. Within a few days. But the one with milk had a weird white gunk in it that I had to put a little extra effort into separating the larvae from.

 

[Uberhoust]

I have a couple of small ponds without fish. During the summer I just scoop the larva out using a large fish net, rinse into a cup of aquarium water and dump into my fishtank. I am not very consistent with it. The extra mosquitoes feed the swallows.

 

[Colin_T]

For everyone reading this, it is illegal to culture mosquitoes in most countries due to the diseases they can spread. So anyone who happens to have containers of water sitting around the property should regularly harvest and remove the mozzie larvae so they can't turn into adults and bite people.

Surplus mozzies that aren't fed to the fish can be frozen in ice cube trays and used as fish food when the adults aren't breeding in the area.

 

[sharkweek178]

I was helping someone drain a pond yesterday. There was a leak in the side of liner. There were some minnows in it. But since the water wasn't deep enough, they died over the winter. So we were draining it and I saw lots and lots of mosquito larvae in that dirty gross water. I thought it was way too early in the season given how cold it's been lately. I wasn't about to harvest those larvae. Since fish had been in that water, I don't know what kind of pathogens could have been in it. But I think it's time to set out my own buckets.