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Kaylenna

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Live yeast - like what you'd get once the baker's yeast stuff gets going?  Or in a sourdough starter?  Because I I think the biggest difference between the dried stuff and "live" or cake yeast is the lack of preservatives in the latter and possibly the rate at which they'd get started multiplying.  Hmm... there's also the sludge at the bottom of diy CO2 bottles.

Rice cereal... must try that too.  I don't really like the smell of wet cat food...LOL.

By the way, please don't take my questions as anything other than my trying to find out WHY people use certain recipes or do certain things etc. 

Thanks for all your input!

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I couldn't tell you exactly what it is to be honest, i didn't ask anything further because it sounded like a painful process and I dont need THAT many microworms. He breeds large numbers of rainbows so uses them a lot. I end up having 3 cultures that i use a few days at a time when new fry come... Haha.

Farex rice cereal, no smell :)

Didn't take any questions as rude or anything :) I am always happy to share fishy knowledge, as your bound to have something useful for me at some point too ;) 


Happy to help :) Look out for article(s) this weekend or earlier if we're lucky...

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@jc12, thanks, got the VE and MW.

We don't have white bread in this house,  can i use wholemeal bread? 

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43 minutes ago, jayc said:

@jc12, thanks, got the VE and MW.

We don't have white bread in this house,  can i use wholemeal bread? 

Ha!  You'll have to tell us if it smells... LOL.

Or does anything else wonky.

Theoretically, it ought to work - the bread (carbohydrates) are just there to feed the yeast.  The microworms eat the yeast.  The giant culture I was given was in oatmeal and I've read about baby cereals, potato, rice, instant potato mix, and a few other things I've forgotten.  But when I've baked bread with whole wheat etc (anything other than plain flour), it tends to be denser than regular white.  I *think* the yeast aren't as active/eat it slower.  That may affect your yeast production, but likely not enough to go buy an entire package of white bread so you can use a few slices worth.  You could potentially try adding sugar to speed them up!  Asks me if that works after I go get a bunch of small lidded cups to try various recipes.

Edited by Kaylenna
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2 hours ago, jayc said:

@jc12, thanks, got the VE and MW.

We don't have white bread in this house,  can i use wholemeal bread? 

Probably and I dont see why not, i find white works best as its more resistant to mold. But give it a go! :D People use oats, potatoes and all sorts of stuff as explained by kayleena :) I'm sure you have something in the house.

 

Edited by s1l3nt
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I've never tried wholemeal bread but I don't see why not. Give it a go. If the culture crashes I can send you more. Haha.

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

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Plain mashed potato and instant mash both work but stink BAD lol. Puffed rice crackers work but don't seem to give good worm numbers.....bread always seems to go mouldy for me...oatmeal is great because if you cook it in the microwave in the container your going to use, hopefully most of the other mould and bugs get nuked and ya just get to add(once cooled off) your yeast and starter. weetbix and oatbix crumbled and moistened with a bit of boiling water then let cool then add yeast and starter is also a very good one that doesn't stink too bad till they get old, but all cultures stink once old I find. Have also tried white bread soaked in milk but mine has always moulded up plus gone sour. Best yeast I have found so far is "lotus" brand brewers yeast I bought in a chemist shop. Used bakers yeast from supermarket before and that was also good. just a few pin holes in the lid I think stops any flys laying maggots in the mix and helps keep the mix moist. Too big or too many holes and the mix can get fly blown and also dries out too fast .I also take the lid off the container every day or so and just wave some fresh air into the container as I feel the yeast could be giving off CO2 in small amounts and being heavier than air, could maybe displace oxygen to the detriment of the worms .Would my CO2 theory account for the reason the worms climb the walls of the container to maybe gasp a bit of oxygen at the top of the container....??...I don't know ,but it works for me :-) Another live culture I have just read about is a beetle/weevil culture that is added to plain flour.....the beetles lay eggs that hatch and grow into tiny grubs which can then  be sieved from the flour and fed to your fish. Seems the fish are not that keen on the adult beetles so ya just reintroduce them to fresh plain flour to make new grubs. This system is used for bettas in USA so I don't know if the same beetle/weevils exist in Australia ... I am going to stash some open containers around the garden in covered dry spots with some plain flour in them and see if I can get some kind of native culture going. If ya don't try these thangs ya will never know huh?

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25 minutes ago, tigger said:

Plain mashed potato and instant mash both work but stink BAD lol.

Ah, good to know... maybe I'll not try that one...

26 minutes ago, tigger said:

but all cultures stink once old I find

How old is old?  That is... when do they start stinking?

31 minutes ago, tigger said:

I also take the lid off the container every day or so and just wave some fresh air into the container as I feel the yeast could be giving off CO2 in small amounts

I do that too - It's not a small amount if you've got a decent number of yeast (as evidenced by bubbles in the media).  It's quite a lot of CO2.  After all, diy CO2 for aquatic plants is basically the same thing, with a lot of water and minus the microworms.

33 minutes ago, tigger said:

Would my CO2 theory account for the reason the worms climb the walls of the container to maybe gasp a bit of oxygen at the top of the container....??

I wondered why they did that too... but mine seem to congregate in certain areas that do not correlate with the placement of the holes.

35 minutes ago, tigger said:

Another live culture I have just read about is a beetle/weevil culture that is added to plain flour

I've actually done one of those - they are a good food for lizards and we used to have a spotted gecko (had to give it away when we moved to AU).  I raised meal worms - the larval form of darkling beetles (called such because they're basically iridescent black, I think).  The beetles do indeed eat flour, oats, wheat, bran, etc.  Mixing up their food and sometimes sprinkling in vitamins was recommended for grown better lizard food.  Culturing is easy and not smelly if you do it right.  You basically get some larva/beetles, dump them in a plastic box at least 6 inches tall, add about 1-1.5inches of substrate/food.  You can put in a small source of water (piece of moist veggie on a small plastic dish/take away lid) on the surface of the media.  Mine lived in one of those plastic tower storage things with 3 drawers... in my kitchen (to give you an idea of how not smelly). 

Adult beetles have very hard shells - I'm not surprised that fish wouldn't like them.  The larva have a fairly hard err... skin? too, unlike earthworms and the like.  They're dry and require noticeable pressure to squish.  The larva start off tiny (about 1mm) but can grow quite big - about 4cm long, 4mm in diameter.  I'd not considered them because that's bigger than some of my fish? .  And I didn't know how well they'd do in water - sink fast and die fast if uneaten??  In the US, you can get a culture of those going very easily by walking into a typical big-box pet store and asking for meal worms! (lizards are not regulated pets as they are here). 

58 minutes ago, tigger said:

I am going to stash some open containers around the garden in covered dry spots with some plain flour in them and see if I can get some kind of native culture going.

Do tell if your experiment works!

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This thread is becoming quite interesting and useful.

I find myself referring back to it almost everyday since starting the VE and MW cultures.

 

 

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Re the stink...it depends on the medium used and the temperature you keep them at but by about the 6-7 week mark they usually are on the nose and best kept somewhere your not going to spill them and at this stage best to divvy them up into fresh cultures. The meal worms you can buy here in most good pet shops but I cant imagine feeding them to bettas,even giant bettas would struggle to eat something this tough. I am hoping for something soft and small... like a 2mm witchety grub that would be sievable and small enough for small mouths. Ant lavae  are a great size but a butt pain to collect. Another great standby of no effort is the good old mozzy lavae,just make sure ya feed them at wriggler stage before they pupate into the "swimming comas" stage and none should end up hatching and coming back to bite ya on the bum :-) . Once ya know what to look for it is possible to actually harvest the mozzy egg rafts and put them in the new fry tank to hatch and be scoffed. The rafts are about 1/2 the size of a match head and consist of a bunch of eggs all standing on end,black/grey coloured and ya can just lift them from the water surface on ya finger tip and then dip said finger into fry tank to float them off. I like the fact that the female mozzy has to have eaten some of my neighbour to be fertile,so in a roundabout way I am feeding my fish with my neighbours :-)

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1 hour ago, tigger said:

Ant lavae  are a great size but a butt pain to collect.

Umm.. How about adult ants??  They're sorta easy to collect.  That is to say - there are times when I'll had several thousand trooping through my old house.

Do fruit flies work at all?  If you could either get the flightless ones or possibly put them into a floating closed dome on the water?

1 hour ago, tigger said:

I like the fact that the female mozzy has to have eaten some of my neighbour to be fertile,so in a roundabout way I am feeding my fish with my neighbours :-)

The idea of purposely growing mozzies is scary - because I KNOW if one gets through, it'll be me that gets bitten.  Besides... how do you know you're not feeding your fishes with your own blood?  One wonders a bit why you're enthused about feeding your neighbors to your fish...  (I get to tease Tigger - he's my fishy guru and the source of my microworm flood.)

 

3 hours ago, jayc said:

I find myself referring back to it almost everyday since starting the VE and MW cultures.

How are they going?

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lots of ants in my fish room, usually forming a queue to where the latest jumper has landed ?   .......have found fish to snap them up only to spit them out again and leave them alone so no good. Fruit flies are great if you can get them, have seen flightless cultures sold at the fish auctions occasionally but always been out bid on them. There are millions of mozzies hatching out in old tyres/blocked gutters/flowerpot holders and drains, if one should escape my fish feeding endeavours I doubt I'll lose any sleep over it  ? . I would prefer feeding neighbours to my fish as it saves me having to scratch mozzy bites :dead:

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20 hours ago, Kaylenna said:

How are they going?

MW are going nuts now. And finally climbing the sides.

I'm about to start a 2nd culture.

 

VE doesn't seem to be multiplying as fast. Maybe it's the apple cider vinegar I'm using???

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6 minutes ago, jayc said:

MW are going nuts now. And finally climbing the sides.

I'm about to start a 2nd culture.

 

VE doesn't seem to be multiplying as fast. Maybe it's the apple cider vinegar I'm using???

Great the MWs are now climbing for you.

VEs multiply faster if you chuck in a few cubes of apple but it becomes messy. Refer to the PDF I sent you.

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3 hours ago, jc12 said:

chuck in a few cubes of apple

Well ... I chucked in an apple core, does that count?

I thought, why waste the apple, I'll eat it and use the core instead, which normally gets thrown out.

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10 hours ago, tigger said:

 Fruit flies are great if you can get them, have seen flightless cultures sold at the fish auctions occasionally but always been out bid on them.

I've seen the flightless kinds at large chain pet supply stores, they even come with a medium, are there places like that in Australia you can try?

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3 hours ago, bluestarfish said:

I've seen the flightless kinds at large chain pet supply stores, they even come with a medium, are there places like that in Australia you can try?

There doesn't seem to be as many such options in AU as in the US, but there are a few.  Of course, I normally get mine from friends who have access to Biology labs doing Drosophila research - they usually have several options even and an endless supply.

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Core should be fine Jayc, maybe try and use an organic cider vinegar in case the cheap brands put something in to stop vinegar eels living. I put a half teaspoon of sugar in my vinegar too and use a one part water to 3 parts vinegar solution with a bit of an apple in it and that's it.

 

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2 hours ago, Kaylenna said:

There doesn't seem to be as many such options in AU as in the US, but there are a few.  Of course, I normally get mine from friends who have access to Biology labs doing Drosophila research - they usually have several options even and an endless supply.

There's two large (nationwide) pet supply chains that I know of in the US, though I don't know how common it is for them to carry flightless fruit flies...I tend not to linger by the live food section of those stores. (crickets creep me out!)

Do your friends know if there are any biology suppliers in AU that sell to the public?

If I ever do daphnia the place I plan to buy eggs from is a well known science education supplier for example.

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33 minutes ago, bluestarfish said:

There's two large (nationwide) pet supply chains that I know of in the US, though I don't know how common it is for them to carry flightless fruit flies...I tend not to linger by the live food section of those stores. (crickets creep me out!)

Do your friends know if there are any biology suppliers in AU that sell to the public?

If I ever do daphnia the place I plan to buy eggs from is a well known science education supplier for example.

My Bio-related friends are all in the US :P  They usually gave me the leftovers from various experiments.  The closest I have here might be to bug my husband to wander through the bio department at Melbourne Uni begging for flies... yes... I can see that'll go well. 

Although one of our moderators might not have to wander far to find a Drosophila lab.  Or at least an experimental genetics class.

In the US, most of the time Petco sells "wingless" Drosophila melanogaster and, more rarely, the larger D. hydei (but those still have fully functional wings).  Of course, if you don't mind the flying bit... you can very very easily culture your own fruit flies - leave some half rotten fruit, vegs, or banana peel (peel because I usually eat the banana) in a jar outside.  My praying mantis had no trouble with the flying ones.

Edited by Kaylenna
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3 hours ago, tigger said:

use an organic cider vinegar in case the cheap brands put something in to stop vinegar eels living. I put a half teaspoon of sugar in my vinegar too and use a one part water to 3 parts vinegar solution with a bit of an apple in it

Might have to try a different brand when I renew the culture.

 

I used 1:1 apple cider vinegar:water. Based on the recipe I got. Half water to half vinegar. 

I'm sure that won't be a problem, as a lot of recipes seem to use that ratio.

Maybe I just need to give them more time to multiply.

 

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3 hours ago, jc12 said:

I find VEs multiply much slower than MWs... you won't get an established culture in a few days. My experience is 2-4 weeks

That's the one I'm using. Cornwells.

Ah, now you tell me. 2-4weeks.

At least the Microworms are going nuts. They are climbing the sides of my container like they need to escape. Conclusion: I guess wholemeal bread works just as well as white bread.

Edited by jayc
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13 hours ago, Kaylenna said:

Of course, if you don't mind the flying bit... you can very very easily culture your own fruit flies - leave some half rotten fruit, vegs, or banana peel (peel because I usually eat the banana) in a jar outside.  My praying mantis had no trouble with the flying ones.

I am not personally interested in keeping them, I was just trying to suss out if there might be other ways members could find them without having to try and win bids.

 

We actually had a really terrible infestation of fruit flies a few weeks ago, we couldn't figure out where they were breeding, it wasn't in our fruit or the trash. Turned out they had made a home in the strainer/plug for one of our drains. We don't even use that sink, so I have no idea how anything delicious to fruit flies got in there. I guess at least it was fruit flies, and not drain flies...

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Sorry about no article guys, been super busy all week. Will get to it this weekend for sure, promise! Trying to work on my website to get the articles up on there too.

Back to topic, i have rarely ever (if ever) seen anything but brine shrimp at LFS's around me. I know of 2 that have carried blackworms (at premiums) but they are far away from me. I've not seen stuff like grindals, banana worms, white worms, etc. I wish these were more accessible here! The rest of the world (especially US) has so many live foods, I want them here! More live foods!! :D


I've fed ants and similar to my fish in the past, probably not the best idea as you don't know where they have been. I've had "maggots" and "flies" appear in micro worm cultures and similar, which I feed to fish. They don't seem to mind at all... I figure they are decent protein anyway. haha.

Edited by s1l3nt
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