More (yawn) later... :)

Lomelindi, there are no pros on this site, though John is getting awfully close. You will have to settle for answers from (more or less) experienced hobbyists. :)

There are a number of things "round and about" which we could feed our fish and increase the variety and nutrition of their foods. Stuff raised outdoors does seem to have more vitamins, and maybe more trace elements and nutrients. Aquarists have often noticed better color on fish raised outside or, to a degree, fed foods from outside.

There are some limits. I wouldn't use worms if the homes nearby or uphill use insecticides or herbicides on the lawn. (Remember those cute, little, lawn care trucks?) If a nearby family sprays for anything, be reluctant collecting anything.

One of the best things to do to raise worms outdoors is just to make a compost pile. All sorts of yard and kitchen (vegetable scraps) can be worked in. I'll probably dig a few worms up this afternoon while doing garden stuff. A few will get tossed in a cup, "for later".

An increasing number of advanced aquarists are raising some sort of worm. See John's comments for why.

If one does an on-line search for Vermiculture or worm culture, they will get a lot of hits. To my surprise, I also found a couple of books on raising earthworms in our public library.

The African redworm is popular with aquarists indoors because it and the smaller grindle worm grow fairly well at room temperature. There are a couple of earthworms cultured that way. One of them is also called a manure worm and if raised on manure, are not attractive to fish. But fed on kitchen scraps, alkaline leaves and the like, they are really appreciated by fish. On behalf of my killifish club, I even order a big bag of Purina Worm Chow.

Worms do need space, food and moisture, but not flooding. We had a great program, a while back, by a guy from Indianapolis (his initials are Al Anderson) who uses three old 55-gallon aquariums to co-culture redworms and Grindleworms. He harvests a cup or two of them every second day. There are also patterns for untreated, wooden boxes, which are even vented so the worms don't drown or cook. One does need room to raise them and must be patient while the cultures build. (If you have barracks style stands, worm boxes can be slipped underneath.)

The worm farm sites will want to sell you all sorts of gear. It's nice but not always necessary. A wooden box or some sort of (food quality?) bin which will not poison the worms, a bunch of chopped/ cut up cardboard or white newspaper for bedding, the worm food and patience, are pretty much what you need.

I don't raise them because ours is a slab foundation and it gets pretty warm in the summer and very dry in the winter. (And I can be a lazy bum.) By summer I'm raising really more Daphnia than I can use, outdoors. There are bloodworms now, earlier than usual. If I am not careful, there can be mosquitoes, so a special effort is made to harvest them (sometimes returning the Daphnia to that container to eat the mossie larvae just hatching from their eggs).

We have kidded here about "If a fish can fit into the mouth of another, it will." (Not so funny if you are the smaller fish.)

That also applied for bugs. Guppies are so small that what is raised in the culture barrels out back works better for them. I wonder if the more compact larvae actually have more food value anyway. Smacked adult mossies are relished by larger fishes able to swallow them. The rainbow fish will pick them off of the surface at full speed.

But you've noticed that your angelfish and others with larger mouths will go for larger food. Years ago my Dad re-lined my old (fishing) landing net with material from some sheer curtains. I think he used it to get cats out of trees. ;)

One of the days I'll take that to the field down the block and around the corner and run back and forth like an idiot, waving it. There are a lot of flies and gnats which are small enough for some of the fish to eat. Still don't know about the guppies though. There may be some small fly and gnat species which would fill the bill.

John's net in the freezer is probably the best way to slow them down. A friend of mine found some fruit flies circling some "mature" fruit in the house. He grabbed a little bit of a fine-meshed cloth, pushed it into the wand of his vacuum cleaner and sucked up the little beggars. He also quickly tied the ends of the cloth together and placed the bundle in the freezer.

Since it would take quite a cord to hook up to a dorm refrigerator dragged down the couple of blocks to that field, I'll probably settle for my fish room soup pot, with the lid and fairly full load of water. A clear plastic food storage box with a tight lid might work too. Probably have to rescue some butterflies.

I wonder how hard it would be to make small fly traps which could easily be tossed into the freezer? Googling [live fly traps] gets almost 7 million hits. Googling "fly traps" gets a mere 172,000 hits.

One of the NANFA posts, a while back, told of a person with some fish in a tub in his back yard. He also had a bugwhacker. The tub was settled under the bugwhacker and the crispy critters fell to the sunfish below.

"Back when" we were camping at Ohio's Guilford Lake State Park or something of the sort. The guy next to me was doing very well catching and releasing crappies. I asked him, as he was packing up, what he was using. Turns out he was using fly maggots, which were kept in flour.

Poultry keepers and other will keep a little over-ripe meat hanging way up, out of the way, on a string (outside). The flies will "blow" their eggs into the meat (hence, blowflies). The eggs hatch and the larvae or maggots will drop to the meal in a tray below. In some cases the poultry just eat the grubs there.

That guy in Ohio gave me his extras and after I got over my squeamishness, they worked pretty well as bait. They were so full of flour, there wasn't much disagreeable about them.

However if you Google "raising fly maggots for fishing" you will get a bunch of hits on places which do just that. They sell to fishermen and the pet industry for birds and reptiles. (I just want to see the "round-up" on a worm ranch!)

There were a bunch of maggots in the garbage this morning. Ytech! I carried the bag, at arm's length, out to the street as quickly as I could. Upon returning to the carport, I noticed a number of maggots stuck to the top of the can. That was tossed over in the yard, for the small birds to browse upon.

About an hour later, I happened by. There were fewer maggots, but what was left seemed fairly clean. The garbage can lid  was gingerly picked up and taken back to where two more or less 20-gallon containers of Fundulus were. Those Fundulus, aware of the nocturnal traffic of varmints, primarily raccoons, but also with a few 'possums and skunks (mostly there to make unc walk verrrrry carefully in the dark) and the early morning visits by a gray fox, have learned to make themselves pretty scarce. Tipping the can lid so a few maggots dropped into the water, pulled Fundulus from their hiding places to snap them up. The rest of the maggots were dropped in. As of a few minutes ago, they were all gone.

Once had a crazy male BDR (Big Dumb Rivulus), a 3+ inch male Rivulus amphoreus. He was a widower, through no fault of his own. When his female was lost, he was demoted from his 15-gallon tank to a thin-necked gallon apple cider jug. I noticed that he would enthusiastically jump up the bottle neck to take flake food from my hand. Next came small spiders, caught hanging from their guy-lines. A small selection of twigs were laid in and once in a while, one of those guy-lines was intercepted and the spider lowered into the lair of the Rivulus, by then known as "Animal". He would erupt from the water. Sometimes he got the spider first try. Many times they were both knocked silly. Despite earning few "style points" Animal would perform upon demand and locally became a bit of a fishy celebrity. In his own bowl for a general club fish show, I has to chase a buddy of mine away from him, since my friend was gently tapping the tightly stretched plastic wrap (secured around the drum bowl top with a rubber band). After 20-25 jumps out of the water, I felt that was enough. I was pleased when that (rather attractive little gray ditch) fish took Reserve Best of Show to a gaudy and monstrous Central American cichlid.

Animal wouldn't take any of those big black carpenter ants either. Those ants can be bad news for the house and in time I left the spiders alone, because at least in the winter, a pretty good fishroom population of spiders kept the ants at bay without seeming to bother the fish.

Because of the seasonal heat in the house and the space needed to raise worms, I have found it time effective and maybe money effective to buy a couple portions of blackworms from "my" LFS. They last a long time in their blue worm holders, which are slipped in unobtrusively under the refrigerator cold-cut drawer, where only the nosiest visitor would ever find them. ;)

This comment is becoming something of an all day project, as the need to run errands, be taken by the schnoodle for a walk, and other things keep interfering. As I was typing this, the thought blackworms! came to mind. With the abundance from the Daphnia tubs, the distraction of the wedding and all the logistics that involved, the worms, which should be rinsed every couple of days, have been ignored for a couple of weeks.

There are a few dead worms (less than .1% of them) and some dirt (worm castings?) in those worm trays. But they are rinsing off nicely. It is a good idea to gently rinse them a couple of times and leave them sit, so their systems are purged and addition debris is shaken free by the healthy blackworms. Then rinse again.

Some people have had trouble rinsing blackworms in chloramines and heavy chlorine. They will even have to store treated rinsing water in the refrigerator, near the worms.  Our water must not have chlorine applied at such a critical level and the worms, fortunately, do fine.

That availability of the worms illustrates another likely hood in feeding fish or even in supplementing their flake food diet. We are usually only going to feed what is most convenient for us. Once in a while I will drop a few crushed half peas for the live bearers and break up a few pieces of Freeze Dried Plankton for the larger fishes. But those things are for novelty, even if really appreciated by the fish.

Another interruption in commenting here was a trip to the "back 40" when the sun was high in the sky, for visibility's sake. The stroll was made with two pint jars of greenwater, a fine-meshed net about 10"/ 25 cm across and the schnoodle, who hopped up onto the chaise lounge, from where he could supervise. ;)

I took a healthy scoop from each of a couple of Daphnia vats-barrels-32-gallon garbage cans. The nets were emptied in the greenwater jars. Those were then taken back indoors and stowed in the refrigerator. That will slow down their development and metabolism - just as some of us do with live brine shrimp. They will remain healthy, as opposed to suffocating, until I get around to feeding them tonight. The greenwater, by the way, will all be strained out by then. (Actually it was within an hour!)

The number of Daphnia outside will be replaced by the time they are harvested again. Actually if they were harvested more often, there would be room for more small Daphnia for the small fry.

The leaf litter in them largely fuels the barrel cultures outside. That also explains the abundance not only of Daphnia but also of Ostrocods and some bloodworms. With the recent rains, three inches of water was taken from them in the course of harvesting. An inch of greenwater was gently poured back in each container.

John's use of dissolved yeast along with greenwater is a dynamite feeding combination. He has evidently mastered dissolving a little bit in warm water and then adding water until it is just lightly tinted. The experimenters reporting in Needham, et al's Laboratory Culture of Invertebrate Animals (Dover Press reprint about 1962) highly recommended those two foods as the best for Daphnia.

I don't use yeast because I am a klutz and if a clumsy person over-feeds the yeast, the water will become short of oxygen and all of the Daphnia will die. Right now they are so prolific as is, I don't need more Daphnia! (And must start doing more water changes if the fish ever eat all of the Daphnia in their tanks.)

Likewise I will not put a bugwhacker above a pool of fish, even if I kept fish large enough to crunch down roasted June bugs. That Klutz and lazy factor again - I'd probably electrocute myself. ;)

All the best!
unc