LIVE FOODS
FOR
TROPICAL FISH!

Click on Picture to Enlarge
by Mike LoBello

Grindal Worms are one of the best all around foods for smallish tropical fish. They are easy to cultivate and easy to feed and easy to collect to feed to the fish. The really best part of grindals is that they can be cultured in room temperature and don’t require any extra pieces of equipment such as a refrigerator. All you really need is a shoe box type of container or larger. Most people don’t use anything much larger than a shoe box or maybe a sweater box because it simple gets a bit unwieldy and quite frankly there is enough worms produced to feed maybe 40-50 tanks 2-3 times a week from a container the size of a shoe box.

Materials:
1) Shoe box with a top
2) Piece of glass that will fit inside the box yet leave an inch
or two of air around the sides of the glass.
3) Enough peat to fill ¾ of the box
4) Some people like a bit of black dirt in the mix (I don’t use it)
5) Some sort of flake type food for the worms (Baby Cereal)
6) Water (I don’t think Chlorine will hurt but I use tank water)
7) Some sort of starter cluture of Grindal Worms

Setup:
Take the peat and soak it until it is completely soaked in water. Boil it if you wish, it really doesn’t matter; you simply need it to be soaking wet. Take the peat and drain/squeeze the water out of the peat until it is “more moist” than pipe tobacco. I realize that wetness is a relative call but if you squeeze a handful of this peat like "handshake pressure" there would still be some water coming out of the peat. It’s like a lot of things in a hobby, you have to get a feel for the wetness of the peat but for sure it is not of prime importance. Just don’t let it be super wet and don’t let it dry out. The rest is easy!

Put at least 2-3 inches of peat in your container and you are almost ready to go. In the middle of the peat put your starter culture of Grindal Worms. Indent the starter culture so that the piece of glass will lie flat on top of the peat and then put enough food (Flake food or Baby Cereal or pelleted food) to cover the starter culture. As the culture grows you can expand the area you put the food on until you have a culture that covers the entire top of the peat.
New food put on top of peat.

Now put the glass cover on top of the new food and the culture is now ready to produce your constant supply of live food for your fish.

Glass in place.

Feed the new culture when all of the food has been eaten (that will be obvious) and in about 7-10 days your grindals will be ready to go. Keep the glass clean as this is where the worms will congregate but aside from that you are ready.



A culture that is ready will look similar to the above picture. The glass has been lifted and the worms are obvious. There are simply worms everywhere. On the glass and on the top of the peat (above picture).

Close-up of the worms on the glass.

There are several ways of harvesting the worms and it probably depends on the size of your culture but I have used the following method. I will get one of the hang on filter boxes the fish shops use to put fish in after they capture the fish and before they put the fish in the bags. I'll fill the box with 2-3 inches of water and go to the culture. Take a syringe and fill it with water and then open the top of the culture. Lift the glass off of the top of the peat and hold it vertically so that if you squeeze the water from the syringe on the glass it will run into the box. Now actually do that. You will see that the worms will very easily slide down the glass and into the box of water. Repeat enough times so that you get all of the worms off of the glass and then dry the glass well. Feed again and put the glass back and cover the culture and put the culture away.

You will notice that the water is a bit dirty. First of all that's just peat moss but I choose to clean it before I give it to the fish. Rinse and let sit . . . rinse and let sit until the worms are as clean as you want them and then proceed to feed. I then use the syringe to pick up the worms and squirt them into the tank.

Bingo . . . you are now giving you tropical fish the treat of a lifetime.

You can revitalize your culture by mixing the peat up and getting air back into the peat (it will compact a bit) and it will only slow your culture by a day or so. Every month or so you can cut the culture in half with new peat and you either have two cultures or you can auction one off at your club meeting.

Grindals tend to get a bit "buggy". I have tried for years to maintain a "bugless" culture but after 2-3 weeks they just come back. So when the bugs get a bit annoying I just make a new culture. I really don't know of anyone who keeps a bug free culture of grindals. There is a "water" culture of grindals going around the hobby so as to eliminate the bugs but before you try that method I think I would do this easiest of all methods first.



The above pictures are of the collected worms in the capture box!

Good Collecting . . . next time we'll talk about White Worms!