They are also found in septic systems, city sewers and the filters / overflows of commercial fish farms. They occur naturally in the sediments of lakes, ponds and estuaries, where they consume fish rotting detritus and fish waste. Tubifex are an annelid (just like an earthworm), aquatic, colonial worm that can live in high oxygen demand environments. So why would you feed them? Primary for a varied diet and expanded nutritional / bacterial profile, secondarily because some fish that are tricky feeders initially will ravenously eat tubifex, (this will work in your marine tank too, though the tubifex won't live as long.) This brings us around to this week's live food topic, culturing your own Tubifex worms.

Many fish breeders feed tubifex to young fish or to breeding age fish to bring them into spawning condition. There are some fish that just won't take frozen food initially, let alone pellets and flakes, but there are almost no fish that won't eat things like live Artemia and Tubifex worms. Nutramar's pellets also the benefits of shelf stability and ease of measurement, which can be done by weight or volume a vastly easier process than with thawed (wet) foods.Īll this being said, there is still a place for live food, and your local fish store probably still stocks some live food items for you. Nothing can offer a more complete nutrient profile, higher protein density in this digestible of a package. Today, we feed pellet foods from Nutramar in some percentage to the vast majority of the fish we house. The increase in quality of both flake and pellet foods has increased dramatically in the last 15 years. That being said, today's hobbyists don't have to rely on live and frozen foods as heavily to get their fish and inverts a healthy, varied diet. In our opinion, this is still good practice as not having these foods available means that aquarists have to rely on bait shops for live food and the history of those foods isn't tracked in the same way.

Every aquarium store you went into had feeder goldfish, feeder guppies, ghost shrimp, tubifex worms, meal worms, red worms, black worms, earthworms and the list goes on. There was a time (not a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away) but right here, where feeding live foods was very commonplace and the quality of that food was rarely thought about.

Download tubifex worms live