Collembola- springtails

Foreword:

After reading this article, buy the breeding substrate for springtails at the discount store and the food, with a best-before date of 12 months, at the drugstore.

About 15-20 years ago I tried to breed tropical springtails from time to time. The emphasis is on tried! I always realized that the effort I had to put in and the end result was not satisfactory for me. You needed relatively large containers in which you added coco humus, leaves, white peat and cork crumbs as a substrate. This wasn’t exactly available on every corner and therefore involved a considerable amount of extra work.

They were fed vegetables such as zucchini, cucumber, carrot and mushrooms, cut into thin slices, and flake food. Fish food flakes, dog food flakes and yeast flakes, which were very finely ground and sprinkled onto the substrate. You can’t keep all this in stock for too long, which makes it very impractical. Then you had to wait 8-10 weeks until the breeding was stable before you could feed the animals. I decided to spend a few euros and buy tropical springtails from a pet food retailer.

General information:

Springtails (Collembola) belong to the class of hexapods (Entognatha) and have been around for about 400 million years. They reach a body length of 0.1 mm to 17 mm and are mainly found in humus layers of not too dry soils down to a depth of several meters as well as on decaying plant material. They also colonize habitats as diverse as rainforests, coastal shores, sand dunes, deserts or snowy areas in the high mountains. Thanks to their water-repellent skin, they can survive flooding in an air bubble or maneuver on the surface of the water. To illustrate this again, springtails can survive floating on the open sea for up to 14 days, covering several hundred kilometers.

The very small breeding food is indispensable for feeding young mantids, poison dart frogs, fish and many other pets. I use it in particular for rearing my mantid nymphs. In general, you can add the so-called soil police to any substrate in an insectarium.

Breeding:

I use BraPlast cans with a capacity of 1.3 liters as breeding containers. In general, you can use anything that can be sealed tightly. I fill them 2/3 full with barbecue charcoal that I have previously cut into pieces of approx. 2 EUR. Do not use briquettes or egg charcoal as these are often chemically treated. I pour up to half tap water over it, if you want to feed the springtails to your fish I would prefer distilled water. The breeding batch is ready!

You should keep the breeding stock at around 23-25°C, as the development time depends on the temperature.

Feeding:

I only use brewer’s yeast for feeding. I put as much in the breeding box as the animals eat within 2 days. Alternatively, you can also feed 5-6 uncooked grains of rice. Mold nests form around the rice grains, which are eaten.

The rice grains last a lot longer than the brewer’s yeast. I don’t like mold forming in my breeding boxes, and my springtails developed faster with brewer’s yeast. You can get brewer’s yeast in powder or tablet form at any drugstore. I use the powder and fill it into a salt shaker for better dosing.

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More Information

Feed springtails:

There are several ways to do this, it is best to try everything:

• You can either take a piece of charcoal and shake it out over the cup with the animals to be fed, or you can separate them into an empty cup and feed them in a more measured way
• Alternatively, you can take the breeding box and tip it slightly into a corner until the water almost runs out. Hold this corner over the cup and blow lightly on the surface of the water
• Simply pour a little water from the breeding box into the insectarium