J & J Bettas

Vinegar Eels are non-parasitic unsegmented round worms that eat the bacteria and fungi that grow in unpasteurized vinegar solutions.  They live about 8 months and give birth to about 45 young every 8-10 days.  Adult vinegar eels are about 2 millimeters in length and about 0.10 millimeter in diameter making them a perfectly sized first food.  To culture them you will need a large glass jar filled 7/8 of the way with a 50/50 mix of apple cider vinegar and dechlorinated water, or apple cider vinegar and apple juice (regular vinegar will kill your culture), and I usually add a small segment of fresh apple as I find this helps increase the density of my cultures.  Add your started culture to this mix and put the jar in a dark place and just forget about it for 3 weeks or so.

            Once you have a good culture going you can harvest the eels and feed them to your fry.  Harvesting must be done carefully, as the liquid mix that the eels grow in can foul a fry tank fairly quickly.  There are a number of different methods out there, but I prefer to extract a small amount of worms form the top of the mixture using an eyedropper.  You will find that 90 percent of the worms will congregate on the top, seeking out the more oxygen-rich environment.  I then strain the contents of the eyedropper through a coffee filter (over the original jar) to separate eels from the vinegar.  Next I take the coffee filter with the eels on it over to a sink or water waste bucket and rinse them with a few more squirts of the eye dropper (using fresh water).  The vinegar eels are now ready to be fed to your fry. 

            I keep a small Tupperware container with a few ounces of conditioned aged water in it that is the same temperature as the fry tank   It is in this container that I rinse the coffee filter containing the eels.  From here, using the eye dropper once again, you can control the amount of food you are giving the fry.

            Microworms are not really worms, but actually small nematodes that are very easy to culture.  A staple in almost every betta breeders' fish room, they are nutritious and small enough for bettas to eat in their second week of life.  To culture microworms, just cook some whole-flake oatmeal according to the package directions (although I find if I leave it a little thicker than recommended I get better results in my cultures).  Allow it to cool, and place a 1 ½ inch layer on the bottom of old sour cream containers or the like (thoroughly washed out) and sprinkle a little yeast on top.  Now all you need to do is add your starter culture and within the week you should be able to harvest them.  There are many different ways to harvest microworms, but my favorite is the old standard of scraping the walls of the jar.  A good culture of microworms will begin to climb the walls of whatever container they are in, and they are easily scraped off the sides with a plastic butter knife.  Rinse the knife in de-chlorinated water and use an eyedropper to feed the fry from this now microworm-infused water.  Microworms will live for a fairly long time in the water, and will collect near the bottom, but be careful not to overfeed by watching how many worms are still wriggling on the bottom and adjusting your nest feeding appropriately.  Make sure you always have two cultures going as they can “go over” fairly quickly. When your culture starts to get over populated it will become liquidy, to extend its life  add some more uncooked oatmeal and a little sprinkle of yeast and give the worms a day or two to start climbing the walls again.  Restart cultures every 1-2 months depending on how much you harvest them, and try to keep a few cultures going at al times to ensure if one dies out you have another going to restart it.

            An old favorite, and a handy supplementary food source once fry are large enough to eat them (around 3 weeks), unfortunately overfeeding or exclusively feeding BBS has been linked to swim bladder problems latter on.  I like to use them 2-3 times a week to accelerate growth, but not really any more than that.  BBS are easy to hatch; it is finding the right brand of eggs that is the trick.  I personally use San Francisco brand eggs and find the hatch rate to be acceptable.  I hatch them in 2 liter pop bottles that have been thoroughly cleaned, but make sure to exactly follow the directions on the package of whatever brand you are using.  Eggs should be hatched in about 24-48 hours in a well aerated (with an air stone) container.  To harvest, remove the air stone and focus a light on the bottom of the bottle.  Within 10 minutes or so most of them should be congregated near the light source and can be siphoned out through a brine shrimp net.  Collect them in the net and then rinse the net in a cup of dechlorinated fresh water.  Using an eye dropper to feed lets you control the amount of food you are giving, as BBS do not live nearly as long as vinegar ells and microworms and will quickly foul the water.  If you hatch more than you can use in one feeding, just put the water you siphoned out back into the bottle and replace the air stone, they will last about 2 days before you need to start a new culture.

White Worms

By far the easiest live food to culture for adult fish is white worms, but the main difficulty is finding a starter culture.  In size white worms fall somewhere between tubifex and bloodworrms and are readily accepted by most fish.  The only down side is they can be a little fatty so I would not feed them exclusively.  To culture them all you need is a plastic container (1 gallon ice cream pails work), some potting soil with a high peat content and no chemicals (fertilizers, etc), and a starter culture.  Wet the potting soil so that it is damp but not soaking and add your starter.  To feed them you can use a variety of methods, the most popular being bread soaked in milk but I find this contributes to the fattiness of the worms.  Personally I treat my worms like a little bit of a garbage disposal and feed them some bread, left-over cooked rice, zucchini and squash shavings, a little oatmeal from time to time and any extra fish flake food I have lying around.  Be sure to adjust the amount of food you are feeding to reflect your colony size (only as much as they can eat in 3 days) and promptly remove any that is starting to rot.  The most important thing with these worms is to keep them cool, they do not tolerate heat well.  Other than that they are easy to harvest, just tweeze some out with blunt tweezers, rinse in water and serve, and completely odorless.  Good luck.

Mosquito larva

            A favorite of bettas, and easy to buy in its frozen form as bloodworms.  In the summer they are easy to culture as all you need is a dish of standing water placed outside and a little patience.  Remember that any extra larva will turn into annoying mosquitoes so use small dishes and whatever you do not use in two days dump out.  I catch the larva out with blunt tweezers and rinse them in fresh dechlorinated water before giving them to my bettas.