Breeding of Live Foods for Monster Fish

[h20man]

I was wondering if anyone on this forum breeds their own live food for their fish? (Night-crawlers, freshwater shrimp, guppies, brine shrimp, crayfish (crawdads), etc.)

I have several tanks where I have fancy guppies in which I use the unwanted fish for food for my larger fish. Crayfish I can get from a clean mountain stream in the area.

Personally I am interested in raising quality night-crawlers/ earthworms in a confined space indoors, as well as how do I get the freshly hatched brine shrimp to the adult stages (hatching them is easy, but how do I take it to the next level?) Any assistance and insight would be greatly appreciated .

Thanks

 

[Volenti]

For earth worms I would think one of those home compost kits would be the way to go, google would have a lot of information on worm raising.

 

[WyldFya]

Somewhere on the site is a couple write ups on how worm farms have been done. I did a write up about a year ago, but I can't find it. Worms are easy, and pretty good source of nutrition. Currently I do micro worms, black worms, and have done dapnia, brine, ghosts, guppies, and cons. All work well for different tasks.

 

[CTU2fan]

I've done guppies & crickets. My buddy used to do worms but I never did, he kept them in the basement so they stayed nice & cool. Crickets are really easy if your fish like them, good source of protein & really easy to gutload.

 

[ethnics]

raising baby's to a big enough size to feed to my monsters takes to long and to me isn't worth the time. but good luck with ur adventure and i hope it works out better for you then it did for me.

i tried ghost shrimp, guppies, and cons. takes way to long for anythign to get big enough to be worth eating.

 

[wizzin]

I decided to clean the substrate in my turtle home the other day and discovered about 200 worms had been breeding in there. Apparently, it's the perfect environment. Moist mulch with a heat rock and food waste. The turtle's been eating them like crazy since I stirred it up. I started a tupperware container with the same setup to start to breed them myself. Seems easy.

 

[wolfcichild027]

breeding brine shrimp isnt that hard once you get a few to the feedable size but if you want a shrimp that will grow large enough to be able to feed to a monster fish fast try triops .

 

[bigspizz]

I breed cons not as a main source, but i can go through the high breeding without any issues. Grab a 5 gallon bucket fill with good soil buy earthworms from any where to feed crumble bread on top and mix it up. these are the 2 that i do!

 

[Thunder336]

How long do you let your cons go before feeding them to your other fish?

 

[ssmith]

Growing artemia can be as easy or as difficult as you want it to be. Keep in mind though that artemia aren't very nutritious at all stages of their life cycle, and there is also intra-strain variability in nutrition as well, so basically do not rely on artemia alone to feed your fish.