How should live bait feed for rice field eels be prepared?

Ensuring a sufficient supply of high-quality feed is the key factor for fast growth and high yields in rice field eel farming. Since the rice field eel is an omnivorous fish that feeds mainly on animal-based feed, its feed sources are wide-ranging and relatively easy to obtain. Therefore, rice field eel farmers can use existing resources to collect and cultivate live bait.

Introducing improved breeding earthworm varieties

Make full use of cow dung, household garbage and other raw materials to breed earthworms. The best varieties are Daping No. 2, Beixing No. 2 and Eisenia foetida. Discarded wooden buckets and wooden basins can be used for earthworm breeding: drill a small hole 1 cm in diameter in the bottom and cover it with gauze mesh to allow ventilation and drainage; a pit can also be dug in a place with good drainage and irrigation, or a brick pond can be built for breeding.

Cultivating fly maggots

You can make your own breeder fly cage and buy improved housefly breeders from a maggot farm to produce sterile fly maggots. A traditional method can also be used: grind 0.5 kg of soybeans into a slurry, pour it into a water vat that can hold 40-50 kg of water, add 2.5 kg of fresh pig blood and 10 kg of water, and mix well. After one week, maggots will grow.

Polyculturing snails

Hang several bamboo cages around the breeding pond, with mesh of 4—6 mu. Enclose a certain number of brood snails in the cages, with 2/3 of each snail cage immersed in the water. Most of the young snails that breed will crawl out through the mesh and can be eaten by the rice field eels. You can also collect snails from canals and rice fields, remove the shells, chop them up and feed them to the eels.

Attracting insects with light

Hang two black-light lamps above each eel pond, one above the other. The upper one should be hung fairly high to attract moths from farther away, and the lower one should be lower, preferably 20 cm above the water surface of the eel pond. Just after dark, turn on the high black-light lamp. When moths are seen gathering in a swarm around the high lamp, turn on the water-surface black-light lamp and turn off the high lamp. The moths around the high lamp will then quickly swoop down and gather around the water-surface lamp. At the same time, because of the reflection of the electric lamp in the water, many moths will dive into the water and end up in the eels' bellies. When there are fewer moths above the pond, turn the high black-light lamp back on to attract more. Repeating this, using this method in summer and autumn can provide 30% of the rice field eels' feed.

Collecting seed sources of aquatic earthworms

Dig a shallow pond where there is a drainage outlet. The pond bottom should have humus mud, keep the water depth at 5-6 cm, and regularly apply some fermented organic fertilizer. Aquatic earthworms will then multiply in large numbers.