live feeding

[Robbo851]

hi , i have recently made a betta tank with one male an african dwarf frog and a apple snail, i got some live red blood worms and daphinia for the frog. how do people keep them , at the mo mine sit in the bag that i bought them in but a lot of the worms are dead. the daphinia seem fine, the bag smells a lot lol what should i do , also is it ok to feed the frog the ones that have died

 

[Torrean]

kind of off topic but once a week or so I give my betta 2 tiny crickets. He loves them. My GF has two ADF's in her 29. They've lived for four months on flake food and algae wafers... oh and live plants. They eat the leaves sometimes I think. They atleast lunge at them and then spit them back out.

 

[ncjharris]

Ideally, you would buy live food and feed them to the fish straight away. But being we don't live in an ideal world that never happens.

If you are going to keep the food, they should be kept in a cool place - a fridge door is good, and then when you do need to use them, reanimate them by warming the bag a little - let it float in the tank for example. This is esp true with the warm weather we are having in the UK at the moment. I blame Tim Henman.

As they are kept in a closed environment, and will excrete something or other, the bag is going to smell - just don't inhale it! If it smells real bad, like really rotten eggs or acidic then you could have something wrong with the food - very occasionally you can get bad batches.

As for feeding them the dead ones, frozen food blocks are dead food, so assuming they haven't started to rot or stew they should be ok. The proof is in the pudding - try a few and see if the fish go for it - if they do, brill, if not, bin.

 

[BigC]

Why don't you have a go at culturing your own live foods such as Whiteworm, Grindalworm, Microworm or vestigial winged Fruitfly.