The Truth About African Nightcrawlers
It is a myth that African Nightcrawlers can only live in warm temps. If you’ve seen some of my prior experiments, you will see that though they may not be as cold tolerant as Red Wigglers, they do fine in temps more extreme than commonly thought.
We’ve just experienced some below freezing temps. I went out to check on the Africans, and they are doing fine. I need to admit though that California freezing temps usually only last for a couple of hours, after that, ambient temperatures tend to increase significantly.
What’s my point? You can kill ANY worm if the temperatures get cold enough. Certain worms (Red Wigglers, European Nightcrawlers) are really toleratant of extreme temps. Though I would not suggest raising African Nightcrawlers in temps that stay below freezing for long, they do fine in temps of around 45 degrees or higher.
Because much of the country is now experiencing extreme temperature, we’ve stopped shipping African Nightcrawlers until spring. As an alternative, I will soon be offering African Nightcrawler Cocoons! You can easily raise the cocoons, and have LOTS of these cool Nightcrawlers by spring!
Details coming shortly.
Tags: African Nightcrawler Cocoons for sale, African Nightcrawlers
January 14th, 2010 at 3:51 am
I wholeheartedly agree that there seems to be a lot of hype around keeping African Nightcrawlers above 70 degrees. my basement store room where the worms were placed in November has bounced between 62 and 65 degrees. They reached breeding age around Thanksgiving and there has been an explosion of small worms throughout the bin which started just before Christmas. Checking a little bit ago there are even more tiny worms than last week. All is going great! I did start with small bed run worms in October, so maybe the acclimated to my environment.
The walkabout tendency was quite real, but the light (CFL) and time have solved that problem. The point is, if you have a room that is above 60, that’s good enough from my experience.
Squonk