louis_last
Member
Just a heads up for anyone who has a wormery that it's mosquito season. Not everyone is aware of this but mosquitos are INCREDIBLY attracted to the leachate that many wormeries allow you to drain off via a tap. At the moment I have a bucket of it that I leave out next to the wormery and every morning I'm able to harvest many rafts of eggs from the surface of the water. Each raft contains hundreds of eggs and they can either be added directly to your tank to hatch out or kept in a seperate container from which you can harvest the larvae. The eggs begin a creamy white colour and gradually darken to charcoal black right before they hatch, if you add them to the warm water of a tank once they're very black they'll often hatch within minutes of hitting the water.
I appreciate that in some cases bringing thousands of viable mosquito eggs into the home to hatch can be the sort of thing that leads to divorce but there's almost zero chance of them surviving to maturity in an aquarium with fish. Because the larvae must return frequently to the surface to breathe, there's not much scope for them to remain hidden from predators in the tank and they're all quickly consumed.
I have multiple containers of water in the garden, including a large water collection barrel and a small pond, and nothing attracts the mozzies like a bit of wormery leachate. I get some in the water barrel but nothing compared to the bucket of wormery leachate. There's likely to be local variations in mosquito species so I can't guarantee this will work for everyone, I'm in scotland on the west coast, but give it a go if you're after a LOT of free livefood to enrich things for your fish a bit. The leachate really is incredibly effective bait for them.
I'll post a video of some egg rafts and freshly hatched larvae later.
I appreciate that in some cases bringing thousands of viable mosquito eggs into the home to hatch can be the sort of thing that leads to divorce but there's almost zero chance of them surviving to maturity in an aquarium with fish. Because the larvae must return frequently to the surface to breathe, there's not much scope for them to remain hidden from predators in the tank and they're all quickly consumed.
I have multiple containers of water in the garden, including a large water collection barrel and a small pond, and nothing attracts the mozzies like a bit of wormery leachate. I get some in the water barrel but nothing compared to the bucket of wormery leachate. There's likely to be local variations in mosquito species so I can't guarantee this will work for everyone, I'm in scotland on the west coast, but give it a go if you're after a LOT of free livefood to enrich things for your fish a bit. The leachate really is incredibly effective bait for them.
I'll post a video of some egg rafts and freshly hatched larvae later.