Malaysian Blue Worms and How to Increase their Population

There are two types of worms we use in our vermicompost bin that we started in our HDB apartment; Malaysian Blue Worms and African Night Crawlers. Anyone who has searched for compost worms know how incredibly difficult it is to find them in regular or online stores in Singapore, and when found, how expensive they can be. We tried fishing shops at Changi and pet shops, no luck. We also tried carousell and were looking for weeks, but soon found out it was against carousell’s guidelines to sell animals or insects.

We realised a few of them were selling homemade vermicompost on carousell. We decided to try our luck and asked if they would be able to sell us some worms. That’s how we got our first batch of 20 young worms. We could only get hold of 20 worms as the seller did not have more. We knew we had to find a way to increase the worm population.

How we Slowly Increased our Worm Population

This batch of 20 young worms was definitely not enough to sustain the whole bin but was a start. To find out how many worms you need, you can weigh all the compostable waste you produce a week then multiply that by 3. This number would be the weight of worms you need. As blue worms reproduce fast we were hopeful that we could slowly increase the population to be substantial for our bin one day. We prepped one layer of our bin and introduced the worms to their new home. We were so excited by the new additions to our family!

We started with feeding them very little in order to not overfeed them, this meant not putting in all our waste just yet. Overfeeding can lead to issues like odor, PH imbalance, excessive moisture, pests or even affect the worms’ health. Our worms were probably not even 10 grams so you can imagine how little we fed it at the start. We kept the rest of the processes like bedding, waste (nitrogen) to bedding (carbon) content, and upkeep as you would with a regular vermicompost bin.

Eventually we found baby worms in just 2 weeks! Slowly as the worm population increased, we increased our waste disposal as well.

Malaysian Blue Worms

Can you spot the Malaysian Blue Worms among the African Night Crawlers?

Malaysian Blue Worms (Perionyx Excavatus) are commonly found in the Asian regions like India and Malaysia as well as in other tropical climates like in South-east Asia and Australia. These worms like warmer temperatures, 20-25 Degree Celsius, and cant stand the cold (anything lower than 10 Degrees Celsius). Thus, this species is very adaptable to Singapore’s climate provided they are kept indoors and in indirect sunlight.

In the light they look like a very pretty shade of blueish - purple. This species reaches to about 6 inches at adulthood and take about 6 months to reach full growth. They breed like crazy in warmer temperatures (which is all the time here in Singapore!). They can reproduce 1 month into their life cycle which is why they were the perfect worms to have in a situation such as ours where we could not get more worms. They also can regenerate any part of themselves they have injured or lost thus they are an extremely resilient species.

They are waste dwellers as such they love bedding such as cardboard, paper, or any materials you may use for mulching. This species however is notorious for escaping the bin sometimes for no reason at all! We found that they love to escape at night when it is dark outside the bin. If this happens the first thing you want to do is check the bin’s conditions; moisture, temperature and PH balance. If all is good, I recommend installing a small light outside the bin to prevent this.

Conclusion

We had just these worms for about a month before we got lucky again, by asking someone who was selling vermicompost bins if they happen to have worms. This time they had African Night Crawlers. This meant learning about a whole different species!

Soon I will be making a post on African Night Crawlers and how to care for it.

More resources:

The Worm Book: The Complete Guide to Worms in your Garden by Loren Nancarrow & Janet Hogan Taylor. E-book on the NLB website.

Smart Gardening Fact Sheet: Worm Composting. http://www.ladpw.org/epd/sg/tech_sheets/wc_info.pdf