A Quick Guide to raising Vinegar Eels!

Most tropical fish species, fry to adult will go crazy over this irresistible meal. Guppies on up to medium sized tropicals like the beta, gourami and even a few larger small mouthed fish like Angelfish and Discus absolutely love these irresistible meals as they wiggle frantically through your aquarium. Just be cautious not to feed to much as your fish will over gut load themselves if given the opportunity. Further, It’s possible that abdominal bloating or possibly excess abdominal acid within the intestine can occur so in short, feed modestly and in rotation with other foods like live white worms, flakes or other.

Vinegar eels have many advantages to other foods compared to just dry foods especially for fry. They are very easily cultured, collected, and you don’t need to worry about excess feedings of eaten food polluting your aquarium, because the vinegar eels will live quite happily in you aquarium until your fry or fish eat them.

Vinegar eels starting out as microscopic or impossible to see typically grow about 3mm or 1/8in in size max. This makes them an ideal size for feeding to fry that are a little bit too small for baby brine shrimp. The other important consideration is that vinegar eels tend to congregate near the surface of the water making them easier targets for your fry to locate excluding some bottom dwellers like corydoras fry. I have used vinegar eels to as a first food to raise all sorts of fish anywhere from the most difficult of Killiefish to breed on up to Discus that are nearly weaned off the body slime of their parents.

Youtube won't let me list every detail here but I'll try and repost the entire response here in the thread for you.

Happy Fish Keeping!

[PatriotCoinRings]

A Quick Guide to
Raising, Collecting and Feeding your Tropical Fish
Turbatrix aceti (Vinegar eels, Vinegar nematode)
As a Tropical Fish Hobbyist I believe it’s important to share information where possible in order to educate one another collectively. In this video I’d like to address the raising, collecting and feeding of the Turbatrix aceti or vinegar eel and dispel any misinformation that seems to run ramped that they are difficult or impossible to collect little lone feed to your fish.

Most tropical fish species, fry to adult will go crazy over this irresistible meal. Guppies on up to medium sized tropicals like the beta, gourami and even a few larger small mouthed fish like Angelfish and Discus absolutely love these irresistible meals as they wiggle frantically through your aquarium. Just be cautious not to feed to much as your fish will over gut load themselves if given the opportunity. Further, It’s possible that abdominal bloating or possibly excess abdominal acid within the intestine can occur so in short, feed modestly and in rotation with other foods like live white worms, flakes or other.

Vinegar eels have many advantages to other foods compared to just dry foods especially for fry. They are very easily cultured, collected, and you don’t need to worry about excess feedings of eaten food polluting your aquarium, because the vinegar eels will live quite happily in you aquarium until your fry or fish eat them.

Vinegar eels (Turbatrix aceti) belong to the phyla Nematoda, otherwise known as namatodes. Many aquarists have come across flatworms at one time or another when they have allowed too much crud to build up in their tanks where you end up with hundreds of thousands of little white worms crawling all over the glass in their aquarium but rest assured your vinegar eels will not cause this problem. Only in their culture jars of vinegar where billions exist will you see any crawling up the sides of the glass and there are no cons to feeding cultures of vinegar eels to your fish.


Vinegar eels starting out as microscopic or impossible to see typically grow about 3mm or 1/8in in size max. This makes them an ideal size for feeding to fry that are a little bit too small for baby brine shrimp. The other important consideration is that vinegar eels tend to congregate near the surface of the water making them easier targets for your fry to locate excluding some bottom dwellers like corydoras fry. I have used vinegar eels to as a first food to raise all sorts of fish anywhere from the most difficult of Killiefish to breed on up to Discus that are nearly weaned off the body slime of their parents.

In order to culture these guys, all you need is a single gallon jar which I prefer due to it’s wide mouth and oval structure. I get mine for free from my local killie club or from the local bar which otherwise would throw these “Pickle jars away”. Just give your friendly bartender a little tip and ask him or her to save a few for you and I’m sure they would be happy to. If you can’t find anything like that, a 2 litter coke bottle with the top neck cut off would work fine.

To get started, fill the jug a third full of undistilled raw apple vinegar (do not use distilled vinegar).

Second, chop up a red aged apple into small cubes and drop that in in order for the microbial culture to start as it ages.

Third, Top off the mix with RODI or unchlorinated drinking water. Tap water won’t work! And leave a good 4” empty to the top of the rim because as they multiply in mass, they can climb up about an inch or so along the walls of the jar.

Finally, add a starter culture of Vinegar eels. The more you kick it off with, the faster your colonies will grow and be ready to start feeding to your fish. Allow some weeks or even a month or more if you start with a tiny culture in order that you don’t deplete your start up colony and before you know it, you’ll have BILLIONS of little tiny crawlers all over the place ready for harvesting. I typically add a apple core and one cube of raw sugar once a month to replenish the food supply. I also top off evaporated water from the jar which is easy to do especially if you mark the original water line with a black permanent marker.

Harvesting is really easy, just use a funnel which I typically cut the long end off of to fit into a small jar to catch the vinegar when straining. Only a single pipette or two of vinegar eels would be necessary in any single feeding and is done through a coffee filter (all of which can be bought from the local 99 cent store). Pipettes can also be obtained on Amazon or eBay as well.

Each pipette will contain thousands of eels despite your barely being able to see them and as you can see in the video, they look more like a film is growing on top of the jar until further magnification.

Finally, rinse all the vinegar off your eels so you don’t change the pH of your water or end up feeding your fish too high of an acidic food. I use plain drinking water and not tapwater to help prevent killing off any eels prematurely before eaten.

That’s

If you have any questions or don’t know where to obtain a colony, let me know and I’ll be happy to point you in the right direction.

Happy Fish Keeping and have a blessed day.

[PatriotCoinRings]

Just a quick note on something I forgot to add but over the years I've switched up from going 50/50 between undistilled apple vinegar and unchlorinated water to 50% undistilled apple vinegar and 50% real pure apple cider and I've seen a big increase in population growth.

[PatriotCoinRings]

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[michaelwells]

You didn't use a starter culture so I'm assuming the eels just created themselves?

[xavierjohnson]

how do you get the ells out of your sand and do they still live while there in the fish tank