How to raise bloodworms for fishes???

Question

Help?!

Answer 1

Bloodworms are midge (nonbiting flies) larvae... Here is a link that will provide some info. I think the site includes how to make a hatchery out of 2 liter bottles... At the bottom you will see more links to sites that provide live cultures.

http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/microfoods.shtml

Oh, by the way, I live in Florida and after hurricane season we have hatcheries in every water holding vessel around. Come visit and take a few home with you!

Answer 2

This is a difficult undertaking because you'd have to have environments for both the adult midge (terrestrial) and aquatic larvae. It's easier to buy frozen than to attempt this yourself.

I "made" a hatchery one time by accident. I didn't clean out the dead plant material from a 30 gallon outdoor pond (no fish in it, just plants) before winter. In the spring, I had axolotls (an aquatic salamander) lay eggs, which I hatched. I needed living food for the larval salamander, so I looked through the pond vegetation for small aquatic worms and found the bloodworms. They were living in cases built on the dead leaves, or inside the leaves themselves. It takes about 1-2 hrs of searching to collect 100. If I needed them for more than a few months, I'd have run out for what my pond could produce. But this may give you an idea for how to do it outdoors. The leaves the bloodworm larvae liked best were from sweet flag (aquatic plant).

The two-liter hatchery link above is for brine shrimp. I's a good food source as long as you only feed newly hatched shrimp or enrich the shrimp's food (adults are poor nutritionally). But this you can do year-round.

Another year-round food source you can raise yourself is blackworms (these are not Tubifex). Fish love these.
http://www.carolina.com/tips/worm/worm.asp

Answer 3

This link talks about them, but I think you're going to have a hard time finding live bloodworms.
http://www.mainebloodworms.com/facts.html