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white worms

amado

Dal
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Oh excuse me me fancy pants going to the old farm to table I was meaning the chain supermarkets I mean of course you can go to the fresh seafood market at the local dock sure,, but I ain’t never been to one of dem dar fancy farm to table stores. Lol

Farm to table is not fancy a lot of supermarket offer that.
Whole Foods / wegmans offer farm to table
 
Oh excuse me me fancy pants going to the old farm to table I was meaning the chain supermarkets I mean of course you can go to the fresh seafood market at the local dock sure,, but I ain’t never been to one of dem dar fancy farm to table stores. Lol
I don't believe they have fresh seafood almost anywhere anymore. that stuff you see on ice was already frozen or kept at frozen temps and now just on ice. probably lobsters are the exception but nothing else at any of those markets is fresh. yeah if you can get it off the dock that's one thing but otherwise no distributor is going to risk not freezing fish to sell as fresh. they just say it's fresh but it's not.

imo, once it's frozen it's no longer fresh. it can still be fresh catch but it's already frozen.
 
I don't believe they have fresh seafood almost anywhere anymore. that stuff you see on ice was already frozen or kept at frozen temps and now just on ice. probably lobsters are the exception but nothing else at any of those markets is fresh. yeah if you can get it off the dock that's one thing but otherwise no distributor is going to risk not freezing fish to sell as fresh. they just say it's fresh but it's not.

imo, once it's frozen it's no longer fresh. it can still be fresh catch but it's already frozen.
I can’t remember last time I had frozen fish even my kids have never had fish that was frozen
 

amado

Dal
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To be honest I didn’t think fish that we keep in the tank care if it’s not fresh or not.
I always feed my tangs frozen food LRS/rods and a mix of pellets and flake food. They eat nori a sheet every day.
I use to feed clams and scallops to my copper band in my old tank. But in this tank I have no need. I do cut up clams and feed it to all my anemones.

80% of my fish eat algae tangs/ fox face

The point that I was making is to try and keep things as simple as possible.

Growing worms to feed fish is not easy.
 
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I make my own food. it's a combination of frozen seafood I buy at Walmart. it's mostly tuna, salmon, shrimp, cod and nori. sometimes I will throw canned seafood in there too.

I put it in a food processor and make thin sandwich bags before freezing it. all my fish love it and it's much cheaper than buying cubes. I will sometimes still buy krills, mysis shrimp and a couple other things.
 
I'm excited to try the worms though. my tank has 0 biodiversity. copper killed everything off when I had ich. I noticed some ball anemones growing, they somehow survived the copper and I finally added some snails but still no corals since I'm moving everything over to a bigger tank soon.
 

Paul B

NJRC Member
Yes you can keep octopus in a special tank. I even used to spawn them. Here are the babies.



I also eat octopus as I am Sicilian and my family was in the sea food business back to Roman times. :cool:
You do not have to feed worms if you don't want to. As long as you feed whole clams that were not frozen to long.

But live worms have the freshest gut bacteria and I have been feeding them since the 60s. All my paired fish are spawning, they only die of old age, I never have to quarantine and I have no need of medications. Some of my fish are 30 years old and still spawning and in March, my tank will be fifty years old. I feel the worms had something to do with that, but I could be wrong. ;)

The worms are in a box, every few days I throw some pelleted cat food in there and spray some water on them. They grow like crazy.
 
What? I will give you all the worms you want. You just have to come to eastern Long Island to get them. I just sent some to Paulie but I am not sure they will not be baked worms when he gets them. I sent them in a styrofoam box priority mail and it will take 5 days to get there. :confused:




I just tagged you because Mikey asked somebody to tag you. I don't want anything.
 

amado

Dal
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Yeah like I said I am very familiar with worms and feeding fish. I use to order
California black worms for my fresh water discus. They loved it and it was easy enough to keep the worms alive.
But it just didn’t make sense I was able to get all my fresh water discus to eat frozen and pellets. So having worms just didn’t make sense. It just added another layer of things I had to keep a live.
My wife hated the smell of the worms.

 
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Paul B

NJRC Member
I just tagged you because Mikey asked somebody to tag you. I don't want anything.
OK, Good, I don't want anything either. :)

Amado, Good Morning. It also doesn't make sense for us to go through all this trouble to keep fish when they are already in the sea minding their own business. ;)
My worms don't smell and I used to keep blackworms for years. I can't get them here but whiteworms are basically free. I bought a culture maybe 12 years ago for about $15.00 and now I have thousands of them. A bag of dry cat food lasts me about 2 years and I don't have a cat.
They would smell a little if they were in my house, but they are in my Man Cave. You really need to put your nose on them to smell them and they live in soil.

To me, I feel flakes and pellets is not food, but I can feed that to my worms. Also to me, a fat fish is not necessarily a healthy fish. I'm a little fat myself. :p

The only true test of a healthy fish is if it is spawning or making spawning jestures. You can't see that well with tangs as they don't make nests but almost all other fish will spawn in a home tank.
The other test is that they only die of old age and never get sick.

Tangs can live into their teens and clowns live over 30 years but most small fish we keep live about 8 or 10 years.



Here is my Watchmans with their eggs.

 

amado

Dal
Staff member
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NJRC Member
OK, Good, I don't want anything either. :)

Amado, Good Morning. It also doesn't make sense for us to go through all this trouble to keep fish when they are already in the sea minding their own business. ;)
My worms don't smell and I used to keep blackworms for years. I can't get them here but whiteworms are basically free. I bought a culture maybe 12 years ago for about $15.00 and now I have thousands of them. A bag of dry cat food lasts me about 2 years and I don't have a cat.
They would smell a little if they were in my house, but they are in my Man Cave. You really need to put your nose on them to smell them and they live in soil.

To me, I feel flakes and pellets is not food, but I can feed that to my worms. Also to me, a fat fish is not necessarily a healthy fish. I'm a little fat myself. :p

The only true test of a healthy fish is if it is spawning or making spawning jestures. You can't see that well with tangs as they don't make nests but almost all other fish will spawn in a home tank.
The other test is that they only die of old age and never get sick.

Tangs can live into their teens and clowns live over 30 years but most small fish we keep live about 8 or 10 years.



Here is my Watchmans with their eggs.


This awesome I am very familiar with your tank. I have read about in different forums.
This is great if your goal is to breed fish.
But if you just want feed hobby grade fish it just doesn’t make sense. The good we feed our fish today is not like the old flake food you are a custom to. Like I said 80%
Of my fish eat algae in the wild so feeding them nori they are happy.

I don’t want to hyjack this thread. So I will stop posting.
 
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What? I will give you all the worms you want. You just have to come to eastern Long Island to get them. I just sent some to Paulie but I am not sure they will not be baked worms when he gets them. I sent them in a styrofoam box priority mail and it will take 5 days to get there. :confused:



looks good. the guy who sent me worms sent very very very little worms. i am starting them off with some bread, yogurt and yeast. lets see if they thrive. we dont have any cats either. i cant stand them! lol
 

Paul B

NJRC Member
I don’t want to hyjack this thread. So I will stop posting.
I already hijacked the thread so don't worry about it. ;)
I also don't need my fish to spawn, they do that on their own, but spawning means the fish is in the best possible shape it can be in because only very healthy fish can spawn.
If we are going to keep fish anyway, it makes sense to keep them as healthy as possible so they never get sick and live out their life to their natural life span. Just my opinion of course.

As for blackworms, I think I was the first one to start feeding them to salt water fish in about 1971. I also used them on my fresh water before that and thats how I got them to spawn.
I wrote about the worms then (I think) on one of the only magazines around FAMMA (Fresh Water and Marine Aquarium)

White worms are better only because they live for 5 days in salt water. Blackworms only live seconds in salt water.
 
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I already hijacked the thread so don't worry about it. ;)
I also don't need my fish to spawn, they do that on their own, but spawning means the fish is in the best possible shape it can be in because only very healthy fish can spawn.
If we are going to keep fish anyway, it makes sense to keep them as healthy as possible so they never get sick and live out their life to their natural life span. Just my opinion of course.

As for blackworms, I think I was the first one to start feeding them to salt water fish in about 1971. I also used them on my fresh water before that and thats how I got them to spawn.
I wrote about the worms then (I think) on one of the only magazines around FAMMA (Fresh Water and Marine Aquarium)

White worms are better only because they live for 5 days in salt water. Blackworms only live seconds in salt water.
i can live more than 5 days in saltwater, does that mean fish should eat me too? :D
 

Paul B

NJRC Member
CRASH!!!!!!!.

No, not my reef, don't be ridiculous, I have a reverse undergravel filter and everyone who has a reverse undergravel in their tank that crashed, raise your hand.....Higher.

My worm culture crashed. It didn't crash because the worms died, it crashed because I have to many worms. And flies. My two worm cultures are inundated with flies. The fly larvae looks just like worms but a little shorter and the flies are really annoying. They fly around and crash into my bald head.

I tried many things to rid the thing of flies including completely flooding the culture overnight and leaving it outside when it is 35 degrees. The flies just laugh at my feeble attempts and their squeeky laughing really grates on me and exasperates my already grated PTSD.

I also built a container with a small fan on top where it would collect the flies as they hatched and sucked them into a net.

So today I left them outside where it is 30 degrees to stop them from laughing then I quickly flooded their container while holding a huge shop vac over it and as each fly warmed up and climbed out, I sucked them up.

I don't have one of those Sissy Girly shop vac's, this one I built and it will suck the ear wax out of your ears from 10' away through 5/8" sheetrock.

Then I kept running water into the container and pouring it out until it was clean with not a trace of worm or fly poop. After that I poured the entire thing through a course net and ran water over it for 15 minutes which removed most of the soil and those pesky gnats or whatever those little bugs are.

The next step was to swirl what was left, a little at a time in a round container. That congregates the remaining worms in the center and now they feel like they just went to midnight mass and drank to much wine. I sucked up masses of them with a baster thing that I built and put them in a clean container.

I collected about a pint of pure worms. I am sure some of those fly larvae got in but I can't be sure.

I threw out thousands of worms but I still have another culture that has even more flies in it. They are outside now where they may freeze. I will show them.

I may rescue those worms but I have so many that I really don't have to.

I am also considering a new way to collect the worms. I am going to try to use vermiculite which is really tiny pieces of Styrofoam instead of soil. To collect the worms I will just flood it and the vermiculite floats while the worms sink so I can suck them up with a baster. I am not sure how the worms will fare in vermiculite but the next time I go to a garden center, I will get some.

By the way. I don't consider this a problem, a catastrophe, an annoyance, an inconvenience, a set back, or a disaster. It is a part of my hobby that I love. Opening up a can of dry food just doesn't do it for me nor does stamp collecting.
If this was easy, everyone would do it even Nancy Pelosi and she doesn't have a tank. :cool:

worms.jpeg
 
I'm going to check my cultures now. I be ended up giving a lot away to other reefers and didn't realize I hardly had any left. hopefully I have enough to send some to you lol.
 
pumpkin growing in this one lol.

all of them are sort of dry. and I'm not seeing a lot of worms. I really did give most of them away so they are restarting.
 

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checked the worms today. added more yeast and sprayed a bit of water on it. i had some kind of fruit fly outbreak in mine last week, but i just killed them with my fingers and mostly ignored it. they seem like they are gone today, had some just in one but i made a fruitfly trap out of a coke bottle and some apple cider just in case.

my worms are starting to make a nice come back.

20210105_132819.jpg
 
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