JUST A FEW EARTH WORM QUESTIONS

Hi Ammar,

Here is a good article on how to feed worms to your salamander: http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/worms.shtml

Worms survive under water less than a day. If you chop them up, they will die within minutes.

You can try to feed the worms organic debris (such as decaying leaves), but it's not necessary unless you want to culture them. If you found the worms in the wild, often they are a type which will not do well in a culture.

Thanks pin pin wei, but i was thinking my family wastes alot of food do you think that maybe the left over fruit that gets in the garbage at the end of the day i could feed to the worms.

If they are the gray-colored earthworms that you find in soil, then, no, they will probably not do well living in a bucket with veggie scraps. It might be worth a try, but they might all just die.

The kind of worms that eat veggie scraps and do well living in a container are the redworms (reddish in color and with prominent bands/rings).

actually i've been keeping nightcrawlers in a bucket full of soil and giving them veggie scraps and they have been doing quite well.

They might live but they will not reproduce. How do you know it is "nightcrawlers" and not "redworms" by the way? The taxonomy of worms is not simple(to apply it at least...) or even very well explored. I have experienced that worms thrown in aquatic tanks have survived several day while some have died within half an hour. Someone once told me that you can only chop a worm into x pieces without it dying. I did try this but the pieces survived so I am not sure about that, to me they seem to survive any amount of chopping really(not very likely though..). I have thrown 1cm-2cm long pieces of ~10 cm long worms(Eisenia hortensis) back into the culture(well the sals didnt want the whole worm...) and found at least some of them healed later(they are easy to find since they are short and really thick). If you cut them up and throw them in water I dont think they will survive for long.

Sorry about the highly unscientific ranting...