HATE brine shrimp!!

(slight repost from answering a question, but worth bringing up in a thread)

I HATEEEE brine shrimp LOL

So I decided to do some experimenting with this new clutch I just had.

I started them feeding on baby daphnia as well as walter and banana worms.
Week one:: they were on small live grindal worms.
Week two:: they are on small live grindal worms and chopped live tubifex worms.

I was going to start out with vinegar eels, but the culture wasn't large enough to feed off of. My daphnia culture had actually crashed, but I got another one that was large enough to feed off of just in time.

They actually weren't too thrilled with the daphnia, they were eating more of the banana and walter worms. They were equally happy with the grindals, and are going nuts over the tubifex.

Couple of notes, it's very hard for them to bite off grindal worms that are to large, so would be good to keep an eye on size for those.
The tubifex don't seem to have this problem, they seem more breakable because of all their segments and the babies can nip off if the mouthfull gets to big.

There are certainly alternatives to BBS, I'm glad you found a combo that works well.

Where do you get your tubifex? I suspect they are likely to be blackworms actually. It's certainly quite possible to raise larvae on blackworms alone. You can also chop them down to small sizes and the pieces still wiggle and stay alive.

There are several local shops that sell them. They are always a red color, not black.
I acutally just ordered a culture of black worms so I can culture them myself.

Yes, thats what i've been doing, chopping them up into smaller pieces

Okay, now I've got to ask...
I've heard people mentioning chopping up other foods suitable for newly hatched axies, but how the hell do you managed to chop them small enough?!?! I mean, I've seen the size of daphnia compared with brine shrimp + I don't think I could chop anything that small, never mind smaller (since adult daphnia are too large for newly hatched axies). I'm no good at doing the BBS rinsing, so alternatives are something I'm interested in knowing about

Okay so you have to figure out a food source and size by the size of the larvae, if they are indeed just hatched {1cm or so} you will need something small and moving.
The reason why foods have to be alive is that larvae don't hunt by sight or smell at such a tiny size, they only have one sense left to follow, and that is movement. Until they grow there back legs fully they wont develop there sense of smell, as as we all know, they don't have good eye sight, so fro such small larvae to reply only on sight wouldn't be sufficient.
So now you know exactly why they need live food you can figure out how to supplement it.
If your using none live foods, you will need to be able to make them move, this is not easy when movement in the water also scares larvae, so this has to be done in a very sensitive way. to much movement, to big or to long of water "waves" they will just get scared and swim away.
I have never tried feeding newly hatched larvae anything other than BBS because well I find it hard enough to get 2.5cm - 3.5cm larvae to eat frozen foods when they have front leg's {witch is entirely possible}

So unless your supplement food is live, your going to have a hard time trying to get newly hatched larvae to take to it, especially if you have a large number of larvae.
On that note, there is plenty of small live food's to choice from, but always remember when choosing one, it needs to have a good nutrition value.

the chopping is pretty easy, I devised this way of using a yogurt cup I cleaned out, one with smooth sides all the way up... I take a SHARP paring knife I have.

Put a small amount of worms in the cup with as little water as possilbe (though a little is useful)
Use the knife to cut the worms. I really just kinda of randomly cut against the side of the cup every cm or so, back and forth a couple times, and I usually get them small enough.
Any that are still to big I just suck back up in my baster and cut them up, or just feed them to larger larvae.

baby grindal worms and walter worms are tiny tiny so they are easily eaten by newly hatched larvae.

These guys are just starting to get their front arm buds.

ZombieAxolotl said:

There are several local shops that sell them. They are always a red color, not black.

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My black worms are always a dark reddish color, I've never seen any that were actually black.

Jake said:

My black worms are always a dark reddish color, I've never seen any that were actually black.

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These I get are pale sort of muddy-tan red. I guess I'll have a comparison when I get the black worms. The store I more regularly go to said they were tubifex, not black worms. I question them sometimes though lol

When rearing larval newts I found that if you just place the worms in whole in small quantities, the larvae will grab the small ends of the blackworms which then break off feeding the larva. The blackworm will then regrow the ends resulting in an new round of food source being available and the worm will also thin out as it moves nutrients to regrow the ends.

Ed