Unfortunately, the live food that you can buy in your local fish store often comes with a few unwanted extras in the form of bacteria or parasites that can harm your fish.īut your fish can still benefit from the nutrients and proteins that live foods contain if you culture your own live food, such as blackworms. They usually inhabit the bottom sediments of lakes, rivers, and occasionally sewer lines and outlets.If you have fussy feeders in your tank, offering them live foods can often be a very effective way of persuading the fish to eat when they tire of frozen foods. Encystment may also function in the dispersal of the worm. tubifex can survive drought and food shortage.

By forming a protective cyst and lowering its metabolic rate, T. They can also survive in areas heavily polluted with organic matter that almost no other species can endure. The worms can survive with little oxygen by waving hemoglobin-rich tail ends to exploit all available oxygen, and can exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen through their thin skins, in a manner similar to frogs. Micro-plastic ingestion by Tubifex worms acts as a significant risk for trophic transfer and biomagnification of microplastics up the aquatic food chain. These worms ingest sediments, selectively digest bacteria, and absorb molecules through their body walls. Tubifex probably includes several species, but distinguishing between them is difficult because the reproductive organs, commonly used in species identification, are resorbed after mating, and because the external characteristics of the worm vary with changes in salinity. Tubifex tubifex, also called the sludge worm or sewage worm, is a species of tubificid segmented worm which inhabits the sediments of lakes and rivers on several continents. Tubifex, in Aa River (north of France) in a polluted zone, circa 1990

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