African Nightcrawler culture

[pete]

It seems that not too many people on this forum have experience with African nightcrawlers, (Eudrilus eugeniae). So, I wanted to start a thread to document my experience with these worms that I can update over time. Additionally others may add information, too, if they've got experience with these worms.

There's a lot of info online, but some of it is contradictory. Basically a summary the consensus of what you'll find if you Google them is:

• They're large, similar in size to Canadian nightcrawlers, (Lumbricus terrestris), if not larger.
• They prefer warm temperatures. Optimal temperatures seem to range from 20 - 30 degrees C (68 - 86 degrees F).
• They're a good composting worm (hungry, carefree and reproductive).
• They like to crawl at night.

Since, I tend to own larger caudates, these worms sound like they could be optimal since Lumbricus terrestris is such a pain to maintain as a culture. I ordered my nightcrawlers from BWCN farms. I chose their 800 cocoons offer. Each cocoon is supposed to average 4 worms. I figured 3200 worms was way more than I needed, but I'd rather throw worms out than have too little to experiment with. When the package arrived, I looked for the cocoons/ counted some in a portion of the dirt. I'm highly skeptical that there was 800, I'd guess the figure was closer to 100 - 200, but that number would serve my purposes fine. Other than that my overall experience with the company was positive. The cocoons were well packaged and arrived timely with good handling instructions.

I put the worms in my worm bin. Unfortunately, I tend to keep my apartment several degrees cooler than 20 - 30 degrees C (68 - 86 degrees F), so I had to devise a way to warm the worms. Several Internet sites recommend using warming lights to heat the worm bed and prevent the worms from crawling at night. I figured that a light was mostly going to heat the air above the worm bed. (Perhaps a childhood of being nagged about turning the lights off when no one is in the room also made me not like this idea). Instead, I partially buried a plastic aquarium in the bed, filled it with water and added an aquarium heater to heat the bed. See the photo below for details. I'm not sure that the heat penetrates much further than a light would, but it seems to work. So I left the cocoons alone in there scattered on the surface, occasionally adding vegetable scraps.

After about a month I noticed food was being eaten and saw the appearance of little worms. It's probably now a month and a half since I got the cocoons. They seem to be about 5 - 8 cm (2 -3 inches) at this point. They do eat their food relatively quickly. I'd say it's a little slower than red worms, but nothing to complain about (although, I have to let them catch up, because I recently caught a fruit fly infestation from over feeding). I haven't noticed any of them coming up and trying to get out at night, but I'll keep checking for that. I haven't used them as food yet, because I'm waiting to get some sexually mature adults reproducing. It seems this should take about 3 months from hatching.

More to come as it develops. Below are some photos to go with the story.

The worm farm. A wooden box. Propped up on cement blocks and holes drilled in the bottom for drainage. A tablecloth hides it quite well.

The cocoons just after having arrived. Plus a semi-focused photo of one of the cocoons.

The heating system. I covered the top of the aquarium with plastic wrap to prevent evaporation and rain formation.

A recent photo of one of the worms.

 

[Mark]

Do you know if they excrete the noxious gunk that other compost worms generally excrete? Have you tried chopping one?

 

[pete]

I haven't tried that yet. I want them to get a bit bigger before I cut one. If you poke at them and pinch them they don't get all gooey and slimy like redworms, so I'm guessing no.

 

[fishkeeper]

Good to see someone is trying them out!

Their temperature tolerance(think they need to be kept warmer than 60 to do well) is somewhat limiting for those who keep their stuff in the basement but they should do fine in most homes without supplemental heating.

 

[pete]

This is just an update. It seemed that not much was happening in my worm farm in Jan/Feb. I seemed to find few worms. However, scraps were being eaten and the few worms that I saw appeared healthy, so I've been maintaining the culture. I fed one to my mudpuppy with no problems, but I've been sustaining my caudates with commercial Canadian nightcrawlers at the moment. I think that initially, either I had very few eggs, or a very few hatch. However, I was digging around the other day and found a number, small worms less than 5 cm. I'd estimate the whole culture to contain a few hundred little worms at this point. I took a photo of one of them. They're not big enough for my needs yet. Actually, I couldn't find any adults with a clitellum to photograph, but I didn't look too hard. However, this seems to be a second generation, so that is a good sign. Still, I've yet to encounter them "crawling" at night, perhaps it happens once they're at a certain density. Contrary, I find the majority of worms near the bottom of the substrate when I dig for them.

 

[pete]

I just wanted to add a few quick notes. The worm culture is doing great. It seemed to pick up rapidly once the temperatures warmed up. The adult worms definitely stay on the surface. I'd say that I noticed this once they reached a size of 12.5 cm (5 in). Prior to this size they never really "crawled". I kind of like that they sit on the surface, when they're large, because you don't have to dig for them, so the bigger ones are just sitting there to be plucked. These guys are great composters, I think they even do better than my old red worm culture. My only complaint thus far is that they are rather flimsy worms compared to Canadian nightcrawlers, but the size is comparable.

 

[pete]

Just wanted to add another benefit to these worms in aquariums. They seem to survive for a long time when submerged. I found one 5 days later under a rock, with no sign of drowning.

 

[pete]

I was feeling a bit crazy this winter, and I decided not to heat these worms this winter. My curiosity got the better of me. So they were probably in the low 60s on average, likely some days even lower.

Basically the adults didn't survive very long. However, I still had many small worms surviving. In my experience the smaller individuals tend to burrow more than the adults. These small worms didn't seem to mature. During this period I never saw a worm with a "collar". I ended up feeding those to my caudates. It takes about 3-4 small ones to equal an adult. So as you can imagine you deplete the population faster. In March it was becoming hard to find worms, so I ordered a pound of adults to reseed the farm.

The lessons from the experiment...
1. African nightcrawlers really do need to be heated.
2. In a population if you kill the adults and eat the babies, then the population can crash pretty fast.

 

[radtad]

great updates I am convinced that this could be a great food source.
thanks for all your effort

 

[Jayshan]

Hi!

Just thought I'd put my 2 cents worth in! My mum breeds and sells ANCs as fishing worms. She sells them by a tub lot(about 50 worms to a tub of horse manure, unless the tubs have been sitting for awhile, in which case, the worms multiply!).

She started after my nan stopped and gave her the leftover stock. Mum's setup is a big corogated iron ''box'' outside, which she tops up with horse manure. She used to use cow's manure, and says this is the best stuff to have them on, as they seem to be slower growing on horse manure, but we have since changed from having 1 cow to 2 horses, so this is all we have, and not many people sell cow manure anymore around here! They get fed this and house scraps, and any leaf matter lying around.

She had to put a mesh sort of cover on the bottom, as the worms will actually go through the bottom to escape, but we have yet to have escapees from out the top, which just gets covered with newspaper(which seems to get eaten, too!).

The differences we have observed between ANCs and your typical earthworm are earthworms tend to ''jump'' and squirm more then ANCs, and that, like someone else has said, they live much longer underwater then EWs, hence why they are an excellent fishing bait! The colour difference between the two is there, too, ACNs are a lovely purple/blue, whilst EWs are that rainbowy/pink colour.

We found another thing was that the temperature should not be allowed to fluctuate too often, too hot, and the worms will either die off, or will escape, too cold and the same thing will happen. Mum also said that they don't get all gunky when you squish them, which can be helpful when you're baiting your hook!

Hope this helps! We used to feed them to our axolotl(when we had one, s/he lived on them pretty much, never had any problems with him/er eating 4-5 good sized ones in a feeding), but you had to make sure s/he ate it, otherwise you end up with a ''suprise'' when you lift a hidey, like you said!