Vinegar Eel
They
are the easiest small food to culture but more difficult than some to harvest
—until now
Harvester
By:
I
attended the combined American
Livebearer Association Convention and East
Coast Guppy Association Show in
I
have kept them to feed those very tiny fry we get from such fish as Bettas, Gouramis, and the like. I
have always read that these “worms” were among the very best live foods for
these tiny fry. The problem has always been how to harvest them efficiently.
I was enthralled to hear Mike’s colorful saga of how he had dealt with that problem. He said that like me he had been frustrated by the idea of straining them thorough paper coffee filters. He reported lack of success even when he purchased expensive laboratory-grade-filter-paper. I was mesmerized as Mike spun his tale. In the end he created a homemade gadget that seemed to provide the answer.
I have always been an aficionado of homemade gadgets. I loved his story of how he came upon the idea of gluing two screw-on-2liter-plastic-bottle-tops inside a small piece of thin-walled “schedule 20 PVC pipe” to create a small device with two connected right-hand threads. He amazed me with the telling of how this device allowed him to join together two 2-liter bottles that were the backbone of his method to harvest eel worms. I laughed out loud as he told me of the ups and down of his journey.
He explained to me that, after all that effort, his homemade gadget was a bittersweet discovery. He found out he could purchase on the internet for $1.00 a manufactured device called a “tornado tube” that would do the same thing. Mike said he would sell me a “tornado tube” for $1.00, which he said was the price he paid for it. Or I could have a set of three, which is what he recommended, for $3.00 and that he would include a free starter culture of “vinegar eels. This I did.
Of course having the correct tool is no good if you do not know how to use it.
Vinegar eels are often raised in a 50:50
water/apple cider vinegar mix along with sliced apple. Mike say he uses any
decaying fruit or vegetable (he says any vinegar will work). Mike raises his in a
7-gallon plastic bucket. He uses two 2-liter plastic bottles and one tornado
tube per unit. He actually has three sets of these units and uses them on a
three-day rotating cycle. I tried to duplicate his set-up at home but I found
it produced vinegar eels in too large a
volume for my use. I followed his model but scaled everything down.
In
the past I had used a “turkey baster” to capture some
of the vinegar eel culture media. I diluted it with equal amounts of water and
squirted it into the fry tanks. This was “living on the dangerous side”. To
avoid upsetting the pH of the tank water and to avoid the risk of pollution the
vinegar eel needs to be separated from its culture media. There are huge clouds
of worms at all times swarming at the top of the culture media (most notably in
the area of the narrow neck of clear glass gallon jugs). The trick is to
separate the eels efficiently. Mike’s Harvester does this.
As
I understand it, the vinegar eels congregate at the top to get away from the
fermentation and to get near oxygen. That is why they “clump” at the top of
narrow-necked glass bottles. The “harvester” builds upon that concept.
The tornado tube (using two
hose-type-rubber-washers) makes an air tight seal at the neck. This elongates
and extends the “neck”. Deprived of oxygen, the vinegar eels rise through the
tornado tube. There they pass (from the acidic vinegar solution), through a wad
of filter floss (placed as a buffer between the two rubber washers) into the
upper chamber. The upper chamber is an inverted plastic water bottle with its
bottom cut off. It is open to the air and filled with pure (aged) (neutral pH)
water. The vinegar eels arrive, cluster, and swarm at the top of the small
upper chamber where than can be easily gathered with a turkey baster and squirted unceremoniously into the fry tank. Mike
recommends putting a loose fitting cover on top (to slow evaporation).