Critters
White worm / potworm
Enchytraeus albidus
Closed jar only
Small white worms that eat rotting matter in the soil.
What the simulation uses
- Eats litter
- 1.5 mg/day each
- Dead leaves one animal shreds a day, turning them back into soil.
- Eats mould
- 0.2 mg/day each
- Mould one animal grazes a day, keeping fuzz and grey mould down.
- Colony at most
- 5,000 per m²
- How many the floor can feed when food is plentiful; less food, fewer.
- Starving loses
- 5 % a day
- How fast a colony thins when the jar cannot feed it.
- Eats
- decaying plant, microbes, fungi, frass, leftover food
- Foods it lives on; the jar feeds it from whichever of these it has.
- Humidity
- 90 to 100 % RH
- Air moisture it needs.
- Temperature
- 12 to 21 °C
- Comfortable range; beyond it the colony suffers.
- Doubles in
- 30 days
- Time for the colony to double with plenty of food.
- Lives
- 180 days
- How long one animal lives.
Care
- Size
- 10 to 35 mm
- Moisture
- Wet
What kills it
- temps above ~25 C
- substrate drying
- anoxic sour substrate from overfeeding
Description
Sold as live fish food, these worms also loosen and air out wet soil as they feed. They like it cool and decline in warm tropical jars above about 25 °C. Feed lightly, because leftover food sours the soil.
Also called white worms, potworms, enchytraeids.
Estimated, where sources were thin: size_mm; temp_c; breeding (all fields); lifespan_days; OECD 220 enchytraeid test guideline not fetchable.