Live food culture starting ?

Hi all,

I received a small package of live food cultures today in anticipation of the blue gularis eggs coming my way. I've worked with hatching brine shrimp before, no biggie. I did however order microworms and vinegar eels as well. I have never worked with either prior to this.

Culturing instructions seems fairly straight forward, but how the heck do I tell if the starters made it to me alive? Should I be seeing movement in these bags? If there is no movement (the vinegar eels in particular are questionable to my totally untrained eye) is it worth still attempting to start up the culture?

Any guidance is appreciated!

I have no experience with the eels so I can't speak on them.

The microworms are difficult to see but if you look close, you can see movement. It will look like it is wet and glistening as a whole rather then individual worms wriggling. If you don't see this, you may have bought an immature culture.... give it a few days and check again for glistening. If that doesn't work, let me know and I can set you up with a culture of them and some grindal worms.

Hi thanks for your reply.

I started both cultures the day I received them. Good news is that both cultures are fairing well and are definitely populated. I wasn't expecting either one to be so difficult to see. You really have to strain your eyes to realize they are there. Note to self- find a good magnifying glass! On the down side, neither is really ready to harvest for my odd, hitchhiker fry that appeared in the tank yesterday. Of course, feeding a single fry is far less taxing then feeding, say, hundreds.

no more micro worm cultures for me
at one time I kept dozens of cultures going, at first harvesting was only what moved up side of conainer so that harvest would be clean of media
serendipitous discovery - addition of heat forced a lot of worms to climb out of culture and onto sidewalls, this benefited culture too as culture would use more media before reproduction stopped which also meant more micrworms were harvested per culture
heat from a fluorescent light for 15 min was enough, more heat was not helpful

Nice tip on the heat, Bob, thank you! I'm also trying a small piece of wet paper towel on top of the culture (where the majority of the population normally resides), and gently scraping worms off of that. The culture seems very healthy right now, and luckily the numbers I need to feed one tiny fry are in no way stressing out the colony. I'm thinking a bit of heat would definitely speed up migration onto the cooler paper towel.

Does anybody have a culture of live food I could have? My local fish stores have no live food and I'm getting dwarf/pea puffers which are picky and only eat live food.

Pea puffers require high protein
What cultures
Worms?