How to Culture Microworms. No Yeast: Banana Worms
- Jan 05, 2025
- Anshika Mishra
- 21 0 0
Feeding fish fry can be a little challenging, epsecially if you have a very small fry or you are struggling to find a reliable source of baby brine shrimp. In fact, in many ways, microworms are at least a little bit easier to use than baby brine shrimp as they can be kept in constant culture that once established can be grown indefinitely and are always avilable to you.
Plus they don't need to be hatched out or replaced which is ideal if you only have a sporadic number of baby fish. Also, they are taken just as readily by both fry and older small fish. You can give them that same boosting growth that you would get with other protein and fat heavy food.
Getting Started
If you have a basic culture, you only need to have a few easily avilable material in order to get started and the first thing to do of course, if you want to purchase yourself a small colony of microworms, either from a fellow fish keeper who happens to be keeping them or most likely for most of us, from the internet.
This can be any of the three varietes of nematodes we commonly keep and refer to as microworm so either banana worm, walter worms, or the microworms themselves. Once these arrive, you are ready to start setting up thier culture to grow them a bit more.
The Container
The second step is to get hold of an air-tight container. This doesn't have to be very big and you can also put air holes in the container as neighter as the worms live in a slowly decomposng stagnant pool of bacteria that is growing on a substrate.
Not only do the worms not need a very high concentration of oxygen so long as you open the tub every 3 monhts or so, they will get plenty of oxygen for themsleves. But they are also quite smelly, with a strong acidic odor. Also, having air holes can make teh susbtrate quite prone to drying out and this will definitely kill off the worms they need a moist environment to move around and breed.
Adding The Substrate
The step three of this process is your worms will need a substrate to live on. This will grow their food for them which comes in the form of bacteria and also gives them some way of moving around with enough surface area for them to cover.
So, place 1 cm of rolled oat, oatmeal, dried potato, or any thing that is predominantly starch-based into the base of the container and then add enough water to the substrate. It should be just about moist, Not dripping nor dry either.
This will breakdown and decompose over time and the worms will live on this and the bacteria that prolifates on it and they will be able to sustain themselves overtime. You also don't need yeast, because the cultur eis perfectly capable of growing its own bacteria for the worms to feed on.
The wet oats will start to decompose in about a day or so which will immediatly start feeding the bactier and the colony. Adding yeast can also be quite detrimental because if it starts to produce too much alcholod if it starts to dermet very quickly then it will defintely kill off teh worms.
So, better to go without yeast and play it safe. Once your substrate is setup, you can simply plop on the worm culture and mix it gentely with the substrate to distribute those worms all around. Next, pat down the worms genetly in order to remove any air bubbles and then seal and lid and set aside in a darkish place that doesn't get too hot.
Standard room temperature is absolutely fine. Basically, if you are comfortable at that temperature, then the worms will be too. In about one week, you should have a thriving little worm colony that is growing very happily.
You can tell it works when the growing numbers of worms stats to climb up the sides of wall of container. It in this climbing number that you feed to your fry. Just wipe the worms off the side. Use a paint brush to pick it up and distribute it in fry water.
Refreshing the Colony
Over time if the colony starts to develop a slightly alcohoclic aroma or if you think the worms aren't reproducing as fast as they should, then it might be time to give them a substrate refresh.
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