Tubifex

(sachet of about 30 individuals)

Highly appreciated by fish, the Tubifex is smaller and finer than the Blackworm. It can therefore be suitable for smaller fish.

These brown-red aquatic worms measure between 1 and 3 cm, rarely more. They are especially very thin.
In the wild, they live in the mud and organic debris at the bottom of the water.

One must especially not give fish Tubifex taken from the wild, as they are commonly polluted by heavy metals, but especially carriers of pathogenic elements, such as bacteria of the genera Aeromonas or Pseudomonas, transmissible to fish.

Our Tubifex are raised in controlled conditions to avoid this, and of course, they are never harvested in open environments.

The Tubifex holds records, as it is capable of living for long periods (several months) absolutely without oxygen! It can be found in completely anoxic waters, those famous smelly "stagnant waters." It has been discovered that it can also come back to life after a period of desiccation, which is quite unprecedented for an aquatic animal.

If it is so common in polluted environments of organic matter, it is precisely because the tubifex is one of the most efficient decomposers. It cleans up the environments by feeding on decomposing waste, and it is precisely its ability to live without oxygen that allows it to play this role in waters where few other species would survive.

Unlike the Blackworm, Tubifex reproduces both sexually (it lays eggs) and by dividing its body. The laid eggs are very resilient, allowing them to survive very unfavorable periods without disappearing from the environment.

In a natural aquarium, and especially in the absence of fish, Tubifex is therefore of interest in increasing biodiversity with an additional species. It burrows into the substrate while leaving its tail "dancing," which retracts very quickly at the slightest danger.

It forms fewer massive gatherings than the Blackworm and its colonies are more scattered, spread across the entire surface of the substrate. Even if a food source (a slice of vegetable, a dead leaf, a corpse of an water louse...) inevitably causes a gathering!

If you install a pocket pond in the garden (in permaculture for example), tubifex will serve as a life insurance for this water hole: in case of eutrophication of the environment, due to excess waste for example, the Tubifex will sometimes be the only ones to survive to ensure the depollution of the whole and a return to a normal state. That is why I strongly recommend systematically introducing them into these. 

Indicative weight: 17g