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Bloodworms in cacoons

Joined
10 Mar 2018
Messages
469
Location
Aylesbury
Hi all, not sure where to post this.
I pulled out old plants and flame moss and left them in a bucket of tank water. I never got around to doing anything with them. Just came to throw them away and apart from finding some baby cherry shrimp in the bottom. There is also what appears to be bloodworms, however they have made themselves little tubes.
Them only come out when you disturb them.
I live feed so it could be bloodworm


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Hi all,
Yes they are bloodworms (Chironomid Midge larvae), and they make, and live in, these tubes.

If you collect your own bloodworms you can use this to your advantage. After you've clean up the big fragments of leaf etc you can leave the blood-worms over night with the fine fragments and they will rebuild these tubes, with mucus and the fine grains of detritus.

When you want to feed the fish you carefully pull the the tube apart, extract the midge larvae and feed it to the fish.

cheers Darrel
 
Good to know they're blood worm and nothing more sinister, I thought they were some kind of caddisfly lavae to start with.
 
Hi all,
.....I thought they were some kind of caddisfly larvae to start with.
I assume they build their tubes for the same reason, it offers the animal some protection from being eaten. You get bloodworms in clean water, but usually only as a very minor component of the species assemblage. As an example, if you put a bucket of rain-water in the garden and add some leaves, you will get bloodworms.

Where you have a lot of organic pollution it provides food for them, and reduces predation, and you can get huge numbers build up. That is one reason why I don't buy bloodworms, (live, frozen or freeze-dried). If you have enough to be worth harvesting they have come from very polluted water.

cheers Darrel
 
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