I keep a couple of planted aquariums and am planning on building a 10 gallon tropical bioactive and wanted to ask, in your opinion is it possible to source springtails and isopods from outside? Or is it not worth the trouble or problems that might arise? I am only just gathering materials at the moment and plan to have the viv running/let it cycle with just plants and a cleanup crew for a few months at least before adding any livestock.
It’s perfectly possible to catch isopods outside and use them as clean up crew, and I have done so myself! I personally think it’s best to catch them and culture them for a while first and use the next generation in my bioactives that have other animals in them. This eliminates the risk that they have been exposed to pesticides or similar, and may help result in a lower parasite load (but it does not eliminate the risk), reasons we don’t feed wild caught bugs to our pets.
They can take a while to become productive depending on how many you catch and the age they are. They do not need to be full grown to breed but they need to be around six months for many species. Catching a large number of the same species adults will mean they will reproduce faster, and you’ll have a good chance of having both male and females. Be very gentle, and you might even catch some females that are already carrying babies in their pouches. If you aren’t gentle, they may be damaged or drop the babies too early. I simply scoop them up along with whatever their sitting on, and don’t handle the isopod itself at all. Later I use a cotton swab to separate them from whatever else I scooped up, letting them crawl onto it, and transferring them to the culture that way, or tap them off bits of wood and leaf.
Theoretically you could gather wild springtails, but to be honest it’s probably just easier to start with a culture. The ones that are cultured and for sale are tried and true species that do well indoors in our vivs. One big consideration is if you are doing a tropical (heated) enclosure, the ones outside probably won’t do very well (unless you live in a tropical location, of course), and it’s best to purchase tropical springtails. Temperate springtails are also available for unheated enclosures. There are so many species, and some are great for vivs and others probably won’t do as well. They’re pretty cheap for thousands and thousands and you don’t have to wait for the culture to grow big enough. So it’s possible, but I don’t recommend it. If you purchase one culture and keep it healthy, you can seed an indefinite number of enclosures from it in the future, or replenish the CUC as necessary!
