Community Development of Tubifex Worms Culture To Support Aquaculture

I would like to share my experience of my recent experience in aquaculture community development in Indonesia specifically in the West Java region.

The background of my work is the issue of use of tubifex in fresh water aquaculture. Traditional larviculture especially of catfishes such as Giant Catfish (Clarias gariepinus) and Siamese Catfish (Pangasius hypophthalmus) requires the high use of tubifex for starter feeds of larvae stages of fish. Nowadays, tubifex is mainly obtained from harvest of naturally grown worms in various locations with high organic content. Sewers of South Bandung is one of them. We can imagine that the Tubifex obtained isn't sanitized and mixed with possible contaminants from sewage components. Although tubifex thrive on those conditions but we couldn't fully depend on that source for aquaculture.

Problems comes when the climate changes to rainy conditions. Tubifex growth will decrease because of high increase of rainwater. The tubifex will be on shortage and will be hard to find.

One of the solution is to culture tubifex worms in modified earthen ponds and through adjusted techniques, the mission was done and could be possibly come as a highly potential alternative to aquaculturist to provide their own tubifex and to start their own tubifex business.

One of the techniques to culture tubifex worms is to prepare a shallow earthen pond with the water depth of around 15-20 cm. The incoming water should be sufficient but its possible to apply a water regulator and modify the water inlet to softly spray the water column.

Various literatures said that tubifex would thrive better if its protected from direct sunlight. From the picture you could see that I prepared a bamboo structure all over the pond and then will be covered with paranet shading.

After the shading is complete then organic fertilizer should be introduced. In this case I used chicken feces that is evenly spread on the pond. We could wait around 1 week for the pond to be richer in organic content. Addition of commercial probiotics would be fine and will stabilize the organic compounds of the water and reduce the ammonia levels.

The following step is to inoculate tubifex on the ponds and keep them alive for a month of two. The growth will be exponential if everything goes right and ready to be harvested in less than a month.

For maintainance of the pond, we just need to check the water inlet and outlet also add probiotics regularly to the pond

Here are other pictures to enjoy!

I hope this could motivate you all to work, share and care in the aquaculture field.

Planting tubifex and notice the inlet I designed. Kind of sprinkly!

Final look of the Tubifex House!