Keep in mind if you have been feeding them and haven’t had any issues, this does not mean I am wrong. Your bloodworms might be coming from a better supplier!
Thoughts on Hikari and San Francisco Bay? Probably most commonly used. Also other frozen foods like Daphnia and BBS? _THANK YOU FOR THE INFO ON BLOODWORMS AND RAMS! NO MORE FROZEN BLOODWORMS!_ this might be my reason for deaths I couldn't get my finger on.
I've had apistogrammas die after eating frozen bloodworms from both Hikari and SFB brands, I'm so thankful for this video now I don't feel so crazy thinking the bloodworms were the issues.
I have found that they constipate my apistogramas and German rams really bad. As far as my angel's, and plecos I haven't had any issues. I only feed Hikari bloodworms though.
Btw greetings from Tampa Florida! You're the best channel when it comes to giving up front advice on keeping fish without all the frills and gimmicks that a lot of other channels plug into their content! I've been a fan of you and your partners for almost 2 years now ever since I stumbled across y'all when I started my journey. Back then I started out with a couple hillstream loach and a mustard gas Betta. Now I have a whole bedroom dedicated to breeding fish with the overflow of grow out tanks taking up more and more of my bedroom. I have stole or should I say borrowed a lot of tricks from you especially on raising my fry.
I want to mention a thing about Bloodworms; Years ago, I used to have a tank of oscars. They were fully mature, and I used to give them frozen bloodworms occasionally as a treat. Maybe once a week. And I used to just plop the frozen 'cube' in the tank and let them go at it. This was fine a few times, but then one time one of them swallowed the frozen clump. Because they are cold-blooded, they can only thaw them at water temperature, so it stayed frozen inside him long enough to actually damage the swim bladder and cause it to fail. All he could do after that was float along the top and look absolutely miserable. I tried to see if he could be healed. He would eat, reluctantly (for an oscar) if I hand-fed him directly. But after a month of hoping he'd pull through, I finally had to euthanize the poor little guy. It was absolutely heartbreaking. Since then, whenever I feed bloodworms, I always thaw them in warm water completely before putting them in the tank.
I just recently had a similar situation but luckily I didn't lose any fish. I just started keeping fish about a year ago and about 3 months ago, I learned about frozen blood worms. I bought a pack and I dropped a two or three cubes in my tank every other day as a treat and a break from flakes & pellets. My fish loved them. After that pack was gone, I went to go buy some more. The store was out of them but I spotted a really cool looking Salvini Cichlid that I just had to have. I bought him, took him home, and put him in my tank. He was a good bit bigger than my other Cichlids and quickly became the tank boss. A few days later, the blood worms were back in stock so I bought another pack and I gave my fish a treat that same day. I was watching all my fish taking turns nibbling on the frozen cubes when all the sudden, the Salvini shot to the top of the water and swallowed the whole cube. My first reaction was "Cool" but then I started thinking "That can't be good". I never even considered bloat but I was more concerned about a frozen block of food in my fish's stomach. I was more afraid that it was painful to him....kind of like humans getting an ice cream headache. That's when I had the idea of dropping the cubes in a bowl of water and thawing them out before feeding them to my fish. This turned out to be better than dropping the entire cube in because more fish get to eat some of the worms. Thankfully, I didn't lose my Salvini to bloat. I hate to hear that you lost yours.
I'm messaging from Singapore. There are no pig farms here! There was about two which closed 30 years ago! All food is imported as there is no farming due to not enough land. A few chickens are kept for egg laying,thats all.
Been feeding frozen blood worm to my fishes for years and have been all well.. Personally, i think it depends on the brand of frozen blood worm used.. Some brands have poor quality blood worm which looks bad and are black in colour..
No issues with Omega One feeding my community tank. Not the only thing they get though. Note, freeze dried to avoid any pathogens! If feeding frozen, absolutely you can run into problems.
@@blaircox1589tbh my fish love them and my crayfish devours them actually prefers them over the minnows i gave him, to the point i’ve had a minnow with him for over a week now im just letting them be together but i use omega one too and my other fish devours them but i still use flakes too but it’s really the only think my crayfish enjoys to eat
i would also like to mention that my young koi fish love them and my molly likes them too, but again i would definitely give them their flakes or pellets too and only every once in awhile i give them the bloodworms i’ve been scared of bloodworms for their main diet because even before i did deep research i’ve know that bloodworms aren’t the more nutritious things for them but my crayfish mainly needs protein in his diet and that’s why i give him bloodworms and the minnow just eats whatever’s left over and then i throw in a small amount of flakes to enhance colors and give them a balanced diet
I have run into a couple pretty serious breeders who hold the same opinion of bloodworms as you do. However, through talking out what happened with them I think we have narrowed down the real problem. I have fed literally thousands of pounds of bloodworms (not an exaggeration, thousands of pounds of them) over the past 20 years with zero problems. My theory is that whenever someone has had a problem it had to be one of two things. 1, you bought crap bloodworms just like that article you were reading was stating, although I’ve never seen those available at any store, only through direct ordering from Asia. Or 2, and I think far more likely is that when these people have problems with bloodworms they at some point along the shipping lines (farm to packaging plant, plant to shipper, shipper to wholesaler, wholesaler to local store, and sometimes there are several steps in between, somewhere in there they were thawed out, went rotten, and were refrozen after. Sadly most hood profit above their clients and will 100% refreeze them. Just my two cents, obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinions.
OK blood worm have killed 4 of my fish 3 within a week and I just thought they had a disease or some thing and I haven't put blood worm in my tank for a few weeks and today I put some in and a small molly was being greedy with them and I've just found it dead with half the blood worm sticking out of its mouth ,I'm actually gutted 😢had this fish from a fry and he was doing so well ,so 4 fish dead and all were eating blood worm
Bloodworms are a great food in my experience.. i dont give it to my african cichlids but everything else gets it and ive never had an issue.. Though, i do find it interesting that you feed Beef Heart which is a land animal meat.. something they will never come across in the wild.. would def reconsider that in your concoction of homemade fish food :) cheers.
Any frozen food can turn bad if allowed to thaw and refreeze. Unless you personally cultured the bloodworm and froze it yourself you're trusting a chain of supply - and the hotter the climate you live in, the more prone things are to go horribly wrong with frozen foods. This is especially true if you put frozen cubes directly into a tank, which is a BAD idea. This is simply because it's very easy to tell good bloodworm from bad by smell - but it HAS to thaw a little first. At least one cube from each strip should be tested by smell in this way. But that applies to ANY frozen food. Blood worm are of course midge larvae - and one thing that tropical freshwater streams, ponds, lakes and rivers have in common the world over are billions upon billions of midges. Saying blood worms aren't good for species that survive in nature by eating midge larvae throughout their lives is just absurd. So if it's not that midge larvae are bad, it MUST be something else? You can hypothesise about what that 'something else' might be, and the subject is wide open to discussion and conjecture - happily there is plenty of excellent research to read so we can mostly avoid just throwing opinions around, especially those that start with 'In my experience . . . ' . . . as if that meant anything! In science there's a saying 'correlation isn't causation' - it's a warning not to assume a causal link between events without proper testing of the facts - with suitable controls. This happens a LOT in the fish keeping hobby and unfounded myths abound. The problem is that the source of most of those myths are laughing all the way to the bank - (e.g. sellers of god awful crappy fish food that's 50% + filler) while well intentioned, genuinely concerned hobbyists spread their lies unwittingly.
I used to breed discus I had over 15000 gallon and over 700 discus I fed them nothing but bloodworms but high quality ones only. Always had great success with breeding and never had any die offs
high-quality bloodworms are a good supplementary food for species that appreciate extra protein in their diet (bettas, cories, etc.) but, of course, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to fish. this is an important topic that isn’t often discussed, thank you for this video
I stopped feeding Discus blood worms around 10 years ago and so many issues stopped. I do still feed to my Rams but "VERY SPARINGLY" I caught some blowback on this theory from top breeders. Great information and I feel very important 😀
Fast forward 10 years, im sure technology, resources and methods have vastly improved. Maybe give it a shot again and see if things have improved from 10 years ago
Technology has definitely changed that is exactly why I won't invite those issues for my very expensive fish. The dry foods and other foods are so superior to 10-20 years ago and give all the nutrients the fish need which sometimes are worth 500.00 plus. I don't question Hikari blood worms I think they are very high quality. It's the casings of the worm that get caught in the long digestive tract of these fish which causes stress and sickness. I think as a treat you would be fine but I'm not willing to buy truckloads of medication to treat my Discus and believe we feed this food for the look of the food more than the actual benefits to our Discus. I do feed it to my Rams and catfish to help induce spawning behavior but very minimal and cautiously. Just 1 man's opinion that works for me. Have a wonderful day and thank you for commenting 😊
I found this video to be extremely helpful, and I'm glad I came across your channel. I am getting back into the freshwater hobby after many years of being out of it. It's interesting because my current bettas actually want nothing to do with blood worms. I won't be feeding them to any of my future cichlids. I agree that the homemade diets can be really nutritious.
Thank you for confirming this for me! I had a Ram die on me the other day after feeding him bloodworms and I didn't know what to make of it. A half hour after feeding the bloodworms, he was at a 45 degree angle gasping at the surface and dead a few hours later. He was part of my perfectly healthy breeding pair that I've been getting a ton of GBR fry out of so it didn't make any sense at all. I've been feeding them bloodworms daily based on Dean's direction to make sure they keep breeding but I think it's costing me fish now. You and Justin definitely have a much better grasp on the fine details of breeding.
Hey man, I’m an apisto breeder/seller in the US. I can tell you over the last 2 years of breeding for profit that blood worms kill apisto. They don’t have the digestive track to handle the blood worms exoskeleton. I lost some of my best breeders in the beginning due to blood worm bloat.
i have fed frozen bloodworms to tropical fishes for over 40 years discus apistos and plecs with no side effects noted there are no bacteria due to gamma irradation but most the food i feed is home made gel food (use about 24 grams of gelatine per pint of blended food) i also feed whiteworm which people say is very fatty( its not) you can google any food to check the nutrition daphnia appears to be the best live food and that real easy to culture lots of vids on yu tube to show you happy breeding fishy peeps.
Great video Nick! Guppies and livebearers tend to like them in my experience. I haven't had any problems with them. Thanks for sharing! Happy Lunar New Year! 😄🧧
Mine love them, but occasionally one will die looking like it’s stuffed up inside. So I’ll reduce the frequency from every other day to twice a week and see what happens.
I mostly feed mine live brine shrimp. Once a week I give Hikari frozen bloodworms or brine shrimp. So far no issue on my GBR & Apisto. As of beef 🥩 heart its just smelly and pollute your tank. I just avoid. Even when I had discuss and althum.
Thabk you for bringing this ti attention!!!! I recently had a terrible experience with bloodworms! My fish were fine for a year (nothing new added to the tank. No new plants, no new fish) and all of a sudden my corydoras got costiosis, otherwise known as ichthyobodosis... and the only thigh different is that I started introducing them to bloodworms... the only fish in my tank that ate bloodworms were corries, and they were the only ones that got sick! I lost 2 of them 😔. One had problem with their gills, and the other one was just eaten alive, which are both symptoms of that disease. At first I thought it was columnaris, cause it looked a lot like it, until I sent one of the dead ones for fish autopsy ( I had to cause I've noticed my other 8 corries were looking odd as well, and I really didn't want to lose them + they were expensive ) and they discovered it was costiosis! Which is pretty bad! So everyone feeding bloodworms, be extra careful!!! Cause eventhough they are frozen, it doesnt affect this bacteria.
Very comprehensive video Nick, nice! I feed bloodworms on occasions twice a month, if I remember. My community tank is mostly fed on frozen brine shrimp with spirulina or live brine shrimp and good quality dry food.
Thanks! I have's Rams and Apistos. Bought freezer dried blood worms and wasn't sure. Bought frozen brine shrimp and daphnia. They like that better. Thanks again for the heads up!! Cheers!
I’ve been trying to figure out what I’ve been doing wrong and I keep losing my angles and yesterday I lost one of my dwarf guarami. I had bought some frozen mixed food with bloodworms in it and now looking are your video it all makes sense. Thank you for sharing this video and helping people figure out what’s happening to their fish
Hey, I have fed bad bloodworms to my plecos. 2 of my L201 are bloated like crazy. What can I do to help them? Wait and hope? I had zero problems over 4 years, first time feeding red bloodworms and suddenly I got THIS. I am so sad, please help :(
Some very good points Nick. I think its one of those subjects that requires each person to make an informed decision based on their own experience and the fish they keep. When I started in fish we only had tubefex worms. Now those are hard to find because we've learned a lot about the poor conditions in which they are propagated.
really strange, I have fed frozen blood worms to all of my cichlids, including Discus, Firemouths, Convicts, Apistos and African Shell dwellers without any negative consequences, for over 30 years. They have all bred successfully and I have always been praised on the quality of my fish.
Hi! I LOVED your very informative video. Help!...Q? I have an amazing chiffon lavender fins, w/purple/red body mixed in tail. Half-circle Dumbo, male Betta. Hes so smart, I've trained him like you would any pet, dog/cat. He's VERY flashy, especially at night, puts on a show😊 I named him Disco Monkey. So fitting! I got him around time Harry Styles did Coachella, As It Was.❤ 3 live small plants, 1 super cool lightweight snail, Amsterdam. My 3 gallon tank is like its own eco system. Amazing ! DM has gotten som of what looks like fin rot. Help! Whats the best way to treat it? I trimmed up a tall plant, so maybe he brushed against? My other 3 male Bettas lived 4yrs each.
Always buy a good brand normally Aquarium shops sell good quality ones. I have never had a issue in over 30 years using them, I only feed them a couple of times a week.
I feed blood worms to my tiger barbs and it's by far their favourite food however it's caused a few of them serious swim bladder problems when they overeat. The bigger ones get greedy and either pick up two at a time or finish quicker and come back for more. I've had to quarantine two of them before due to swim bladder issues after eating blood worms. It took me a while to realise it was the blood worms that were causing this. I am sure it was overeating though. I would be very careful when feeding your fish these. Good video.
Any frozen food will be less nutritious than good quality pellet or flake fish food. Blood worms from Japan , the ones that are treated with ultra violet light 3 times, is safe and cleaner than most. Any frozen food should be cleaned under tap water in a net prior to be used. That will remove any preservatives and anything dissolved in the frozen water packaged in the process between the frozen organisms. The main nutrition comes from good quality dry food. Frozen foods should be use mostly, a the best example, to help wild fishes to adapt to captivity and to finally be trained to eat dry foods. Can any fish live healthy and for long period of times with only dry foods? ABSOLUTELY! Dry foods should be the goal for the long run. The feelings we have for a treat is a silly one! The aquatic animals we keep have no preferences for "Mc Donald's"!
I don't know for certain, but I think frozen bloodworms may have led to the demise of my male Honey Gourami. He had spawned with my female and she ate the eggs, I separated them and set up a perfect breeding tank for him. Live blackworms got really hard to find in the USA in 2024, so I started giving them both frozen bloodworms instead to supplement flakes. A week before I was going to put female in to breed again, male dropsy and despite seeming like he was recovering for a few weeks, eventually died. So I never got to breed him again.
In over 30 years of raising Angels and discus, I have never and will never ever feed my fish blood worms. Thank you for this video! It's super sad to see so many people feed their fish this crap! 😢
My personnal experience: I lost a couple of Apistogramma and a couple of microgeophagus, just after I start feeding them with blood worms. I switched to frozen artemias and no more problem. I believe also that the cuticle of these worms is too thick.
I stopped feeding my fish with bloodworms and tubifex. They always brought camallarus cotti (red worms) parasites infestation with them. I just stopped. The only live food I feed my fishes with now is baby brine shrimps and it’s all fine. No more parasites bearers as food.
Great video. Interesting, I’ve never heard about issues with bloodworms before. I feed my various tanks, mostly livebearers and plecos, and a single Krib tank, bloodworms once a week, and they lose their little minds over it. Rest of the week, I go between frozen brine shrimp, rephashy, and a few different flakes.
hi from ukraine! what you said is 100% right - bloodworms feed on rotting things in the water and often they are carriers of bacteria that does not get killed by freezing. same goes for some paracites and fish tuberculosis. All the breeders in east europe do not use blood worms , dispite the fact it is the cheapest food we can get here - you can harvest it in any lake or swapm here.
Only had problems with lryetail Swordtails (excuse spelling) and swordtail babies getting bloated and dying after bloodworm but now I just brine shrimp with not problems. I heard it's just the larger bloodworms that do this as they have bigger hairs and are a different species to the regular ones. However my experience put me off them all. Good to here your point of view.
Dude if your going to feed blood worm defrost it first in a little tank water . I only feed it as a treat and I have been keeping fish for 47 years . As a treat it's ok and yes it will fatten up your corys and plecs . But I don't really feel it's that good for smaller fish maybe treat your smaller fish with live food as a treat . They will love it . But that's just my opinion. All the best
If people want there fish to have a varied diet they should just feed high quality pellets and wafers. Like NewLifeSpectrum or Northfin. Most of their pellets and wafers have at a minimum of 10+ major ingredients before preservatives. Hell Hikari or xtreme which are a step down is still better then most frozen foods protein wise.
I got a leech in my acvarium. I don't know where it come from, but i am suspecting eithe plants, or frozen food, that i fed my fish. From what i read, leech can live frozen for a very long time.
My angel fish died today and was wondering why. Now i know. We were feeding my tank bloodworm every day. The other one is still alive but ill def stop with that.we have the same brand as you have in this vid but my kid left them out over night and i refroze them. That might of been the reason or it might of just been that they are blood worm and everything that you talked about in this vid.
I keep fathead minnows which are just the wild type version of rosy red minnows, and the family of insects that blood worms belong to (chironomidae) are precisely what they eat in the wild, they make up a large portion of the animal protein that they eat too. So I guess they should be perfectly fine for the digestive system of my fish.
Cut the Frozen block of blookworms so that all Size's are smaller. them as treats twice a week , they don't make the bloat thru just need too be cut. before feeding. Got this one wrong Justin.😮
I seem to have a problem with blood worms as well. through multiple types of fish they will be keeping well for a week or two then I will go to give the tank some blood worms as a treat. The next day, inevitably, there is at least one fish dead and I've been struggling to find out if it is directly from the bloodworms or if there ends up being a feeding frenzy in which the fish get aggressive with each other. But after watching this video I think I'm just going to stop feeding blood worms all together.
Nv had problems with bloodworms from brands like hikari (sterilised & infuse with vitamins); been using for years. i tend to vary the diet of my fishes though.
Absolute bollocks on the lack of nutrition as they are a natural food source to wold fish.......just think things through before accepting something somebody says just because they use a title. My son is a Dr and knows nothing about fish
Live black and white worms, live peanut beetle larvae are all much better feeds than bloodworms in terms of nutritional content. Not sure beef heart is a great feed because of all the fat, which is very foreign to fish. Ever seen fatty piscivores? Fatty animals just aren't natural, nor are they normally living in water.
I fed my new pea puffers frozen bloodworms. I defrosted them and they ate them. Later that night they were dead. They were fine for a week with my giant infestation of ramshorns. Nothing was changed, the only change was that my pea puffers were dead after eating blood worms for the first time.
I wonder if maybe this is the reason he had issues with it , as it should not be done that way , fish eating frozen stuff can cause problems in their digestive system
I've heard this from several sources recently. I have not had any issues that I can directly relate to Blood Worms but I have been feeding Omega One Frozen Blood Worms usually 2-3 times per week for the last year or so. I wish there was more solid resources and research done to validate some the claims on either side. If my fish end up liking frozen Brine Shrimp as much I don't see any reason not to switch to that. I do want to do some deeper research into this to see what else can be found.
I managed to kill two rosy barbs with bloodworm. I don't use it anymore. The fish bloated and died overnight. Not worth the risk. There are so many good flakes out there and high protein top brand pellets.
I fed my cichlids live juvi guppies they over populate the tank they are in that until I add a bigger fish to keep the population in check I feed a few to my cichlids that I keep in a different tank. Same goes for ram snails and ghost shrimp I let populate in a third tank.
It's definitely the brand not the worm in general , top ram breeders feed blood worms without issue and my entire community tank has eaten them for years without issue . Every fish store in my area feeds them as well . With anything in life there's quality and low quality
I've always made a habit of thawing the worms on a cup of water and draining the water off several times before feeding them. God only knows whats in the water, it stinks.
Recently lost 3 angels in my 90 gal community tank, wondering if this might have contributed. One of them would always go ham on them, sometimes until his stomach dropped. Was just trying to give them a more varied diet.. Thanks for the food for thought. My gf and I watch and learn alot from ya dude. 👍🏻👍🏻
Omg good looking but I have feed my triple reds oops only reason was the shops have been out of live black worms but I will stop the feeding of the blood worms for that tank
I had 2 Bolivian rams and when I got them I couldn't get them to eat and then I used frozen blood worms was all I could get them to eat. They later died. It just doesn't seem like blood worms are worth the risk when you can feed other things. I'm going to throw the rest away and never use them again. Thanks
As someone debating bloodworms as a food source this was actually very informative. Yes it is true that all species are diffrent and while 1 may be ok, a diffrent genus or even co species may have adverse reactions.. To put it in terms alot of humans can relate with. Some people are lactose intolerant while some can chug gallons of milk and eat blocks of cheese without issue. A diabetic will get very sick if their sugar intake is too high or too low depending on type a or b. While some people can eat sweets all day and have no problems.. last example is how some people can handle spicy food or can't and get acid reflux or worse GI tract issues. And as for food quality. It has turned up in every type of mass produced food source. Poor conditions and cheap quality are used to get a bigger profit margin but in the end it is a hazard to use. Thank you for the great information 😀
I feel sad watching this ☹ I got an apistogramma a few weeks ago from my local maidenhead and was told they can eat frozen bloodworm, a few days later he was dead ☹
beef heart ,either to much or a big par of thier diet with shorten the life span., do the the research, less beef hearr and use cold waterfish more in the mix. also cichlids are carnivores and dont need veg in thier mxi.....
I fed my ants and the mortality is high. I thot it is due to high protein content but changing to egg white has no such issue. So bloodworms may have bad contents in them.
I live in the subtropics. I have an outdoor pond and see the little cocoon on the bottom all the time. The reason the cories and plecos are fine with them is they are bottom feeders where the bloodworm lives. These worms don't spend the majority of there time in the middle water column (Where Im guessing the fish that have issues with eating it live?). They may well be farmed with manure however the bloodworm is a detritivore , basically it likes rotting leaves and stuff like that found at the bottom of a pool of water. Its like your shrimp and freshwater yabbies (Crawfish) in terms of what it eats. if you put a tray of water outside in insect friendly weather wherever you live with a couple of teaspoons of finely crushed up plant matter leaves etc. You will end up with bloodworms after the third or forth day most likely. They look like tiny brown socks made of finely crushed plant matter on the bottom. The worms are hiding in these. if you use a fine pet fish net you can wash the worms from the sock. easy to farm. they only eat as worms so if you use a mozzie net fabric of the top of the container the worms will them turn into adults like mozzies, breed and then lay eggs again that will turn into more blood worms... just remember to add more crushed up whizzed plant matter as needed. (Just dried leaves works well )This way you can be reassured they aren't been raised on pig pooh.
Sorry to tell you but those are not bloodworms, they're bagworms which are the larva of stoneflies, not midges. In a warmer northern climate though I've seen bloodworms show up after about a month and exact same method to attract them but bloodworms actually are naturally red in color and behave similarly to mosquito larva- not to say bagworms aren't a good alternative but you may want to keep in mind that they'll use sand, wood and rock fragments to make their tents if they're available in the container so you probably want to remove them from that before feeding just in case they used inorganic material that your fish can't digest. Btw mosquito larva are another alternative but be careful about attracting them and target any floating cocoons before they hatch since no one wants the adults running loose, esp if you bring the culture indoors to feed your fish
Whoa thanks man. Just started frozen blood worms for my new tank full off angels. And I've had losses from my kuhli loaches, black widow tetras and panda corys. Good tip
