Live foods

Live foods. I'm taking a piscicentric approach here: invertebrates are mainly food! Just ask any fish! Some of these food critters you can culture at home— where you can, there's information on maintaining cultures here, as well as links. But you may also be interested in invertebrates for their own sakes: scope the "Invertebrates" folder to find snails and shrimps and other invertebrate visitors that live in the aquarium or that may appear there from time to time. Some other invertebrates, which we ignore until they cause diseases, are in the "Health & Diseases" folder as parasites. Invertebrates also play major ecological roles in the food web.
 
Frozen live foods. Many of the invertebrates in the following list, though not the worms, are available in frozen form. The old-fashioned slab of frozen brine shrimp, which could become partly defrosted and refrozen, has largely given way to small cubes frozen in plastic trays and sealed with foil. A great improvement. Frozen daphnia, frozen blood "worms" and frozen glass larvae are in my freezer at the moment.
 
Live Foods Directory. This brief directory is arranged in order of size, from microscopic on up. Fish fry will move down the menu as they grow.
 
"Green water" (Euglena)
"Infusoria"
Rotifers
Copepods ("Cyclops")
Vinegar "eelworms"
Microworms
Brine shrimp
Daphnia
Grindal worms
White worms
Tubifex
Blackworms
Glass larvae
Bloodworms
Mosquito larvae
Fruit flies 
Scuds
Mealworms
 
Links. There are other directories of live food on the Web that bring together a lot of culturing information in one place:
 
A directory of live foods with culturing instructions, prepared by Oleg Kiselev, Don Wilson and Steve Bartling, is archived at FAQtheKrib.com.
 
Adrian Tappin has excellent culturing instructions of a wide variety of live foods at his "Home of the Rainbowfish" site.