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Jack Heller's Live Food
Culture Notes
Jack and I did a program on live food
cultures for a MASI meeting, and these are his notes on how he keeps
his going. I incorporated some of his techniques into my
notes, but here is the real thing.
Live Foods for Aquarium Fish
1. Paramecium: Gallon Jar or jug, dechlorinated water, fill jar _
full and leave plenty of surface area, add corn husk, add starter
culture, cap jar. When culture is established, feed with eye
dropper. Keep extra corn husks in frig. When corn husk in
jar rots, add new one. These cultures work for a long time and
are excellent for small new born fry if fed in moderation. Tea jar is
good culture jar.
2. Vinegar Eels: One gallon jug or jar, _ cider vinegar, _
de-chlorinated water, add 1 table spoon of sugar on 1/8 slice of apple,
add vinegar eel culture. When established, use baster and squirt
solution through coffee filter. Wash filter off in fresh,
de-chlorinated water. Pour vinegar back in culture jar. Use
eye dropper to feed vinegar eels to fry.
3. Microworms: Use a plastic shoe box with several small pinholes
in lid. I start culture with Gerber Single Grain Barley baby
cereal. I add this cereal to _ inch depth, and add water with
mister until cereal is the consistency of a milk shake. I then
add the culture and cover. I mist the culture each day until the
culture is established. As the medium becomes watery I add
several grains of puffed rice and mist this thoroughly. When the
culture is mature, the worms will start to climb the sides of the shoe
box. Scrape them off with a popsical stick or plastic knife, and
dip them in a small container of water. Eye dropper is used to
feed to fry. Check culture a few times a week for moisture and
food. When culture starts to crash (culture turns dark and gives
off a foul smell) save a small portion and discard the
rest. Wash the box out thoroughly and restart the culture.
4. Grindel Worms: Use a plastic shoe box with several small
pinholes in the lid. Add Magic Worm Farm to about _ inch and wet
moderately with mister. In the middle of the culture, wet
thoroughly and add starter culture in the wettest area. Place a
few pellets of Purina kitten chow over the culture and a poly bag over
it and cover the culture with the box lid. Check daily and remove
any moldy pieces of cat chow and mist lightly. The cat chow
should be gone in a few days. Add a few more nuggets of cat chow,
gradually building up to nine pieces. Mist the cat chow lightly
each time you ad nuggets. When the nine nuggets disappear in one
or two days, the culture is ready to start harvesting. Pull the
poly bag from the culture and wash it off in a small container of water
and replace it in the box. Feed the worms to fish with an eye
dropper that has been clipped to allow for a bigger opening.
Excellent food for medium size fry and breeding pairs.
5. White worms: Use shoe box with pinholes in lid. Add
Magic Worm Farm (1/2 inch), wet thoroughly with mister, and add
culture. Put glass or poly bag over culture Feed new culture a
small piece of yeast soaked bread (just enough that it will be consumed
in a few days). Gradually increase the size of the bread
slice. Keep the worms in a cool, dark place. A basement
floor works well. This culture does best in temperatures of 55%
to 65%. The culture can be washed off the glass or poly bag and
fed to fish with an eye dropper. Watch the frequency of feeding
with this food as it is very fattening, and too much is not good for
the fish.
6. Fruit flies (Drosophila): (Diane's notes from Jack's
talk at MASI) culture in a 1-quart canning jar using the ring part of
the lid to cover the culture with a piece of fabric. Media is a
mix of potato flakes, sugar, and a fungicide available from biological
supply houses (a little lasts goes a long way, and is cheap). Mix
up to a thick paste in the bottom of the jar. Add something
for the flies to climb on to stay out of the media (where they get
stuck and die without feeding your fish): he prefers "Excelsior
moss" which you can get at nursery supply stores (it's actually curled
shredded wood), but the cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper or
some crumpled paper towel will work. Add your flies, and
they'll start breeding for you. To feed, he uses a large funnel
that he found in the automotive section of Walgreens--it has a wide
open mouth but a narrow tube at the end. Set this into an
inexpensive squirt bottle sold for ketchup or mustard. Shake the
flies from their culture jar into the funnel, and tap the funnel until
they fall into the ketchup jar. Put the lid on the ketchup jar
and then invert it over the tank, and squeeze the bottle. The
flies will be forced out a few at a time in a jet of air, which should
have enough force to get them quite wet--so they don't just land on the
water, they get dunked. [Isn't that a clever trick? I used
to feed leftover fruit flies from our lab to my pet frog, and had to
keep a very tight fitting fine mesh lid over the top of her aquarium to
keep the flies in until Froggie got them. This sounds much
simpler. Then I had to be VERY FAST.] Now they can't crawl
out, and the fish will be delighted with this marvelous, complete food.
Always remember with fruit flies that it's just as important to keep
wild flies out of your flightless fly culture, as it is to keep the
flightless ones in. One flighted fly can mate with your
flightless ones and in a generation or two they'll all be
flyers. How serious a calamity this would be depends on the
tolerance of your housemates to small winged pests.
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