Live Food

[Jdubz]

Whats the best way to keep live food fresh as im not able to pop to the LFS to get some for about a week at a time.
Also building a shed with a mini fridge/freezer to keep all my fish equipment in.
I mainly buy the little packets of live brineshrimp and bloodworms.

Any ideas welcome.

Jake

 

[saz326]

How fresh do you want it to be?

With a bit of a setup you could keep it so fresh it breeds and provides further food. There are people with buckets of daphnia growing and reproducing, and people with bottles (2 litre coke jobbies) of brine shrimp and an air pump.

 

[OldMan47]

Very fresh live food. Life expectancy about 35 days but this colony has been self sustaining since early November with the simple addition of a bit of powdered food daily. If I could grow green water algae, I would rather use that as food for the daphnia but it won't grow for me. I have done all the things we advise against to get it growing and so far have only managed to have a weak green tint survive. That is not near enough to feed all of these guys.

I have used many full feeding portions from this tank by catching all I can with a fish net. The youngest daphnia swim right through the net and become my breeders for the next several days until I do it again.

 

[Jdubz]

cool,
ill give the brineshrimp thing ago got a spare air pump and can pick a 2l bottle up cheap enough,

Anything else i need?

 

[Darkerwhite2]

For my brine shrimp i use a light over the bottle too. Keeps the heat up for them. I do daily hatches of them though not a continues colony. The instructions say the water should have a sg of 1.019 i believe. For one gal us add two tablespoons of aquarium salt.

 

[Eclecticoldsod]

For tubifex and bloodworm, put them in an old plastic ice cream tub and leave under a dripping cold water tap.

 

[Jdubz]

Thanks guys!

Jake

 

[Honeythorn]

For larger bags of bloodworm I have a clean empty coffee jar, to which I add the bloodworm, the water they came in and also a little tankwater. I keep that in the fridge with the lid on and change the water every couple of days with more tankwater until they are all used up .

I get portions out of the jar when I change the water, by lowering the water level and sucking them up with a syringe, then squirting them into a little pot that I empty into the tanks.