How to Raise Silverfish? Detailed Guide to Feeding Methods and Key Points

Silverfish are photophobic insects, and most of their growth and development throughout their lives takes place at night. Their living places and food sources are closely related to human living environments. Brick-and-wood structures, lime-earth floors, relatively damp old-style dilapidated dwellings, and warehouses are their suitable habitats. Therefore, when collecting breeding insects, one should choose the above-mentioned places, and even more so make use of their habit of hiding in crevices due to their flat bodies, as well as their characteristic of greedily eating worn-out clothes, paper, and greasy foods, to make collection tools.

A. Preparation and use of traps: Choose paper made from bamboo fuzz, plant straw, or cotton yarn as raw materials, with a rough texture, not printed with ink or written on with chemically prepared ink, and cut it into paper strips 10 cm long and 4 cm wide. Mix flour and clean water with a little edible sugar into a thick paste, and heat it to make paste; use a round stick with a diameter of 1 cm as the axis, and roll and paste it into a paper tube with a bottom. Take glass canning jars, wash and dry them, place the bottomed end of the paper roll downward, put 10 to 15 in each jar, and pack them as tightly as possible, preferably so that they will not fall out when the glass jar is lifted upside down. Mix a little broken pastry crumbs with a few drops of sesame oil, and evenly sprinkle it into each paper tube for later use. Place the trap on its side under piles of miscellaneous items in an idle room that are not often moved. However, it should not be placed in a kitchen where the temperature is too high and there is too much smoke and oil vapor. After 3 to 5 days, lightly take out the glass jar during the daytime to check; if silverfish are found to have already entered the paper tubes, gently take them out and put them together with the paper tubes into the rearing container. In order to lure breeding insects as quickly as possible, make several trap jars and place them in different environments, collecting in rotation. General experience is that trapping results are better in spring and autumn.

B. Design rearing utensils according to the characteristics of silverfish: Silverfish have very strong crawling ability. They are not only quick and agile, but can also pass through very small crevices, and can use the sharp claws on their feet, the abdominal spines on the abdomen, and the dense scales as attachments, and use a pair of multi-segmented cerci at the end of the abdomen, as well as a long tail filament between the cerci, as boosters, to crawl quickly on smooth walls, and even when their bodies are upside down on glass they will not fall off. Therefore, these habits should be taken into consideration when designing rearing utensils.

C. Making and use of rearing utensils: For rearing utensils, choose a glass jar with a diameter of 20 cm and a height of 40 cm, or a @#@233@#@ jar of the same volume. Place hard cardboard inside the jar to serve as a support, then put in rough scrap paper and pieces of cotton cloth as resting places and food. Use 80-mesh copper gauze to make a tightly sealed cover for the upper opening, then press a piece of glass slightly smaller than the jar opening onto the gauze cover to increase the weight of the lid and prevent silverfish from escaping. The glass can also be moved left and right within a small range to regulate the humidity inside the jar. Because silverfish do not have the habit of cannibalism, are small in size, and have no obvious metamorphosis, 150 to 200 can be kept in the same rearing jar. Place the rearing jar in a dark place, first put in a small amount of a single feed, and after 3 to 5 days, observe whether there is excrement from feeding at the bottom of the jar, so as to understand its degree of food selection and food intake in a human-controlled environment.