Idea for internal food supply.

[joel]

Hello, again.
I've got an idea to culture blackwrms within a tank.
Say you take a fish bowl, one of those glass like ones, and throw some blackworms in there, perhaps with a cover to keep the newts from over-feeding, or some gravel for them to hide in. You could stir up the gravel and get the blackworms all ready to be eaten at suppertime.

Would this work, do you think? If the blackworm culture crashed, would the bowl contain the harmful chemicals produced by the corpses lnog enough for me to remove the bowl? Would this give the blackworms a suitable habitat? I'd probably have to throw some food in for them and all.

If the bowl is compeltely submerged, wil lthe worms survive, or do they NEED to be able to reach the suface?

I'm really trying to get newts and prey in the same tank, but it is proving...complicated, I think.

What's everyone's thoughts on this idea?

 

[jennifer]

It's really not easy to maintain a tank where newts thrive and prey animals reproduce. Have you read the articles available on culturing blackworms? There are links from here:
http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/worms.shtml
I know several people who have cultured blackworms, and all have reported that the reproduction rate is too slow to produce much food. Certainly the blackworms would survive in the bowl. In a tank, they live happily in the gravel for a long time. As long as there is enough oxygen, they don't need to reach the surface (for some reason this is not true when they are stored in the fridge).

 

[joel]

Thanks, Jen.
I have read the articles, but I'm still pursuing this idea, I think I can make it work... I can supplement the blackworm diet, my concern is if the blackworm population crashed, would the bowl contain the.... well, the contaminants?

I'd prefer to try and establish a self-sufficient tank, meaning that I don't have to send away for food every so often. If that ends up requiring a seperate culture of newt-prey, then that's okay.

I'd use nightcrawlers, but I'd prefer something I can take out of the prey tank, and toss in the newt tank, then watch them eat. Sliced up earthworms just aren't the same for whatever reasons...

Any recommendations of some kind of food I can establish a secure colony of? Are Tubifex and microworms large enough for adult notos? I don't intend to have larvae or efts, but the newts may decide otherwise, in which case, I would accomodate.

Ideally, the best situation would be newts and their prey living in the same tank, and the prey producing offspring fast enough to keep up with the newts predation. I beleive it can be done, what alternatives are there to blackworms, that could fill this role?

SO my food should hopefully be:
aquatic
appropriate for adult notos
self-sustaining population.
co-habitating with the newts.

Hope to hear more from you, any advice is appreciated.

 

[jennifer]

Yeah, the biggest risk is that if the blackworms crash, the tank would get foul pretty quickly. However, I doubt that this would happen unless the blackworms were overfed and killed by the rotting food. I would add that I have never seen blackworms "feed" on anything except paper toweling and chunks of dead earthworm; they seem to ignore fish pellets. What would you feed them?

I can't think of any other food that could be raised in the same tank with the newts.

If you are motivated on ecological issues, you might consider raising earthworms in kitchen compost some day, but this surely requires a separate container and it takes months to get going. Small whole earthworms are much loved by Notos.