hello everyone this is brennecker raleigh of fish keeping jamaica
asked me to shoot a segment on the live foods eye culture for my aquarist hobby
i don't culture cherry shrimp as live foods i keep them as pets but i did
want to show you the best cherry shrimp that i have note the color on this shrimp
you'd think that i had select bread her
she's a very deep red
i hope more of my cherry shrimp turn out like her
i'm not select breeding shrimp at this point i only move young shrimp because older ones are
notorious for being difficult to acclimate
i hope she bears some shrimplets i haven't been able to keep white cloud mountain minnow
frying alive most of the time on pulverized flake food so i've ordered a starter culture
of a live food that
hopefully
will be better for them
this is supposed to be
this is supposed to be vinegar eels
i hope there's some vinegar eels left in this looks to me like
most of the culture is gone so this is a double bag vinegario
culture took those last few drops of vinegar eel culture and added them to 50
apple cider vinegar 50 aquarium water and added some apple slices to these jars and covered them
with paper towels held in place with rubber bands
now i'm supposed to wait a month and hopefully after that time i'll be culturing vinegar eels
on the bottom shelf of this stand and next to the stand on the table in the window i
keep gallon jars of used aquarium water with some compost to culture green water indoors
i've added air stones to the green water cultures because
although the water may turn green initially after a while the phytoplankton seems to
settle to the bottom and expire so i believe keeping them in suspension
will help the phytoplankton to survive i also culture green water outside behind my house
during warmer months each year mosquitoes also infest these cultures
and have a ready source of live fish food with those i try to remove them immediately before they
pupate i don't want any extra adult mosquitoes about my house
the red lids allow some bugs that fall into this water to escape
the main point is to avoid fouling the water with rotten bugs
when i find dead or lying bugs floating in this water i remove them immediately i cultured
daphnia on the top two levels of the stand in the window i have 11 gallon jars at this point
a few of the jars also contain some brown paper
and perhaps some black worms in the substrate just in case my other black worm culture
expires here's a close-up of a daphnia culture that's doing fairly well
incidentally there's also some seed shrimp in the culture i'm not sure
fish eat them or not i've had them infest a shrimp tank before and they never seem to go away
not until i added white clown mountain minnows now i don't see any seed shrimp in that tank
this one's probably doing the best at this point
the best way i've found to keep black worms is in a five gallon bucket using mainly
brown paper without any without any writing without any ink on it
as a food source as the brown paper deteriorates the worms consume it
occasionally i add a little bit of fish food but the more fish food you add the
more often you have to do water changes and a water change for black worm culture
just involves straining all the substrate which includes the black worms rinsing it thoroughly
and doing a partial water change these have no heater some people use a sponge filter but i
found the black worms tend to invade the sponge so i just add a near stone keep it aerated and also
keep a lid over the five gallon bucket of course there's a gap left from the airline incidentally
incidentally some daphnia got into this culture long ago and sometimes there's
enough of them to actually extract some with a turkey baster and feed to my fish
it comes and goes but even though it's usually
quite dark in here you see that the daphnia do exist without phytoplankton
they just consume whatever microbes are in this water
black worms make a great treat for tropical fish like this bed of splendens
but only as a treat
don't feed them too often because they are high in fat
i give my better splendons a treat of blackworms maybe once a week
i'm feeding some daphnia to my white cloud mountain minnow adults
i strained the daphnia through a regular fishnet to get the largest ones out
white clouds enjoy the small to medium-sized apnea
oh