LIVE FOODS; Lumbricucus sp ‘chungming’

In the hazy, crazy days of bell-bottoms, Brooke Shields and Saturday Night Fever, looking for live foods such as tubifex worms to feed your fishes was quite a breeze. One just had to look for a drain with soil embankments and work towards finding a mass or patches of red, wriggling worms on a warm day. To collect it, it involved lots of elbow grease, a pair of Wellington boots and rubber gloves (or a willingness to wade in bare footed and hands… aha, I know what you are thinking right now), a pail and the ability to withstand the stench of rotting vegetation and gases that will floor an upper-crust gal within milliseconds. 

Those days, it was a miniature feat to balance the-boy-on-bicycle with one hand on the handlebar and the other clutching the pail and boots (and nose, too). Fish shops would also stock this item and it was a common inventory for fish-shop operators.

It’s different these days. Much of the infrastructures have been upgraded to divert the floods that regularly awash Kuching during the Landas season. Cement embankments are the norm now. These days, natural T. tubifex population(s) is an item extremely difficult to find. I believed that chemical pollution also diminished the population of T. tubifex.

I visited a spot that used to yield aquatic worms which I used to collect when I was a teenage. It is a small patch of sandy ditches that had withstood development and managed to collect a golf-ball size of worms over a period of several days. It could only be done during early morning or late evenings.

I attempted to breed them in 2008 and 2009, using methods described for breeding tubifex and blackworms and all attempts failed. During the beginning of March 2010, I decide to try another time. By now, parameters had been correctly established for conditions needed to breed. This time, the worms started laying creamy colored cocoons which when hatched, appeared as red botches across the surface. Eventually as they grew, they start spreading into a wide maroon-colored patch across the media.

However, my success was short-lived as parasitic invaders in the form of tiny moths started to breed in the troughs they were housed in. Clouds of these moths swamped the troughs and laid masses of eggs that hatched into small creamy larvae and competed with the worms for food. To make matters worse, the creamy-colored larvae developed into black-colored larvae about 10mm long and started to feed on the baby worms and almost decimated the worm population. 

Most of the fishes refused to eat the black larvae. The only fishes that seemed not to mind them were the halfbeaks Hemirhamphodon kuekenthali and freshwater glass prawns Palaemonetes paludosus. So it was a time-consuming task to rip out the troughs, collect any remaining adult and juvenile worms and quarantine them for several days before housing them in new sterilized troughs housed in a different area. All this for a worm. Oh, there is this funky² smell too.

After prolonged, close observations, I have concluded that this worm is neither Tubifex tubifex or Lumbricucus sp. blackworms. Stirring the soil or media and allowing it to settle, T. tubifex will start clumping together into a tight ball of worms on the surface of the media but this worm will not clump together unless the container is bare. L. blackworms thrives in cold water whereas this worm does not like cold water. So I shall nickname this worm Lumbriculus sp. chungming, aka Khoworm after a certain low-life-form-from-Kuching I know of.

There is another type of worm with different behaviors although they look almost the same. This worm was extremely difficult to extract from the media where they were collected from. Once unearthed, each worm will curl into an individual knot and will not clump together unless the container was bare-bottom too so I decided to nickname them Lumbriculus sp knotti.

This worm is of special interest as it seems to be very tough and can survived polluted, anaerobic waters, dried-out media and warm conditions including being under the sun. A trial involves placing a culture in a small bowl with media that receives direct sun during the afternoons and they have survived for more than three weeks without much food and water, wringing their tails after showers fill the bowl. L. sp. knotti  also does not attempt to escape from the container they are housed in whereas L. sp. chungming demands specific water conditions, temperature and other parameters otherwise they (Bless his soul, they are as slippery as he is) will crawl out very fast from the container they are housed in. L. sp. chungming also will not clump into a ball like T. tubifex unless they are housed in a bare container without any media.

My juvenile wild-collected Betta brownorum started losing their shyness once they were fed with chungming and knotti worms and quickly adapted to their new surroundings and grew into healthy adults. I hope to be able to establish a large population of disease, virus-free chungming and knotti worms for my fishes and offer any surpluses to hobbyists who share the same interest as we do.