blood worm everywhere

yeah i feed my axelotls blood worm usually but it gets everywhere!!! atm i hve removed all stones from my tank as kawasaki was eating stones but now the tank is clouded with old grey blood worm and i am worried it will over load my filter, i have changed the water 3 times in the last 2 days as they axies dont seem to mind but im worried its bad for them. its really un attractive is ther any way of feeding blood worms neatly lol ???

Hi Hannie Bee if you have too much debris to remove with a turkey baster you could try a gravel siphon and give your tank a vacuum when you do your water changes.

Good Luck

Try adding a smaller amount then what you have been giving. When I feed bloodworm to my two axolotls there is never any left after an hour or two , they search the whole tank until they are all gone. Perhaps you are overfeeding hence the cloudy water. If I'm feeding live bloodworm I normally try to suck them all into a turkey baster and then carefully lower the baster into the water down to the place where I want them to land. I say 'want' but I rarely get the chance to see them land as the axolotls have realised that a visit from Mr turkey baster means something good is happening and they have now taken to sucking the bloodworm out of the end of the baster as I squirt them out, like a baby feeding from a bottle. Its quite amusing to watch and any bloodworm that manage to escape will be found SOONER OR LATER.

gr33neyes said:

...a visit from Mr turkey baster...

Click to expand...

I laughed out loud at that.

[Apologies for being rather off topic: It's amazing how quickly they learn and how long their memories are. When I got my two recently I gave them a full-face stare everytime before feeding. I thought it'd be a nice party trick to get them to "come" like a dog will.

Within a week or so whenever I went near their tank they'd swim over to the front and smash their faces on the glass and even snap at nothing. I now realise that it was not such a good idea and I've spent the last month regularly looking at them without feeding or trying to feed them without looking at them to 'de-program' them. Now they just know that if a face, a body or a pair of 50cm long tweezers come anywhere near them or the tank then they are likely to get food. ]


hannie bee - You could also try earthworms from the (organic) garden. A lot less messy and an excellent foodstuff.

I use a high sided ceramic pet feeding bowl in the tank for this very purpose. I do the same with mr turkey baster but squirt them into the bowl and then they cant get out. My two have very quickly learned (and i mean within a day) that when they are hungry they just need to look in the bowl. I have also taken to adding some worm tails to the bowl. If you cut the rear end off a worm it will still survive and the tail end will keep wriggling in water for a day. Thanks to the bowl my tank stays nice and tidy

I've also used the high sided feed bowl tactic. Works great. They learn fast where to find the food and what floats out from the bowl is usually eaten. Whatever is left over is easier to clean up as it stays mostly around the bowl rather than everywhere in the tank.

I have a sand substrate and I find they eat all the bloodworm off the bottom and there's none to clean up now. When I had a single layer of large pebbles in the other tank, I used to feed bloodworm on the day I was doing a water change, then use the siphon to clean under the pebbles when removing water.

You can get a large jar and put the bloodworms in, then fill with water and lay on its side in the bottom of the tank. The animal will enter the jar to feed, and when it's done, whatever's left can be easily removed by removing the jar.

If you go to the bottom of this thread you'll see a picture of a smaller jar with a Noto in it:

http://www.caudata.org/forum/messages/7/81121.html?1175393140

When i rear my young larvae i train them to feed from an upturned coconut shell.
I cut it in half and bury the base in the sand at an angle, squirt the blood worm in there and that is where they tended to stay, only ever have a few migrate out and these are quickly devoured.
This is also ideal when you want to move on to frozen, i pop in a mix to start with, some live, some frozen and slowly reduce the live, because they know that is where the food is in the end i can pop anything in there and they eat it.

I like the sound of both of those ideas; might revise how i feed them!

wow...

i would have never thought of doing half the stuff you guys have mentioned with feeding...

i mean i was only told to ever hand feed them, but i guess putting it in a bowl or in a jar would make it alot easier.

i think when my tnak is set up properly i might try that

I have the same problem. I only currently have bloodworms(the frozen kind). Dutchess eats them out of my hand, whenever anything enters her tank she comes shooting out of her hidey hole, and lunges at my hand!!
Because I don't have a gravel siphon yet(I'm going to get one tomorrow), I've been undertaking the very time consuming task of 'worm fishing'.... I slightly agitate the gravel in the bottom of her tank, then scoop out the floating bloodworms. Her filter isn't very powerful, I had to switch the filter I bought for her tank with the filter I have on my guppy tank because she was spazzing over the water current.
I think I'm going to try the turkey baster/bowl idea. Hopefully that will lower the number of free floating bloodworms in her tank.