Small Overhead, Big Profits
Retailers often culture their own live foods for sale on-site, and for good reason. The small investment in overhead has far greater potential for returns in the long run. The big three: earthworms, brine shrimp and daphnia, need little space or investment in time or materials.
Whether you use them as food for the fish you stock or as a marked up item for consumers to purchase for their own tanks, live food culture pays big dividends.
With a few basic guidelines, anyone on your staff can be the go-to live food member of the team with little effort.
Earthworms
Molded plastic stackable systems for farming earthworms are available from a number of sources, but for minimum investment purposes, simple wooden produce crates or shallow plastic tote boxes will do.
Simply fill the stackable boxes or crates with several inches of sterile peat. Wet the medium thoroughly and introduce worm egg inoculations to each bin. Keep the soil moist by gentle watering as needed and introduce food periodically, as it is consumed by the growing colony. Any uncooked vegetable kitchen scraps or yard waste can be used as food for the colony.
Make sure the area used for culturing allows for adequate ventilation and drainage to prevent spoilage. When kept in a warm, shaded location, a modest earthworm colony is capable of supporting dozens of fish (yours or your customers) with fresh live food.
Brine Shrimp
The well-known benefits of feeding fish live brine shrimp make them reason enough to culture, as if the ease of the process weren’t simple enough. Brine shrimp can be cultured in virtually any container, from a five-gallon bucket to a two-liter soda bottle.
Salinity, heat and aeration are the only ingredients needed to produce a viable colony. Just add unhatched eggs to a saline solution created by mixing one tablespoon or non-iodized salt for every liter of water in the tank.
Provided the water is kept between 75 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit and sufficiently aerated, juveniles emerge within the first 24 to 48 hours. With in three to five weeks, with the weekly addition of micro algae, the brine shrimp will be ready for harvest.
Daphnia
These tiny water ‘fleas’ form the base of the food chain for nearly every species of freshwater fish. They can live for several weeks after they are added to a tank, providing a long-term source of food as they feed themselves on detritus in the tank.
Fortunately, daphnia are also very tolerant of poor water quality, meaning they may be in the simplest environments. Whether in plastic bottles, buckets or spare tanks, fresh water, a pinch of baking soda and gentle aeration is all they require.
Half an ounce of bakers yeast to every five gallons, added once a week, and an occasional inoculation of “pea-soup” micro algae from a dirty tank provide all the nutrients daphnia need to thrive and reproduce. <HOME>
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