Writing a blog post telling you all how much, at the age of 32 I love playing with slime isn’t something I ever expected to do. Even my 9 year old daughter has started to ‘be too old’ for slime now but here we are!
So what slime is it that I have been fascinated by recently? None other than Blob Yellow Slime Mold (physarum polycephal)
Over the past few months, my passion for keeping springtails and learning more about their care has been one of my main focusses within this hobby, although I had always kept springtails even before isopods I had never really focused heavily on them, I thought them as quite simple, some soil, yeast, fish flake and moisture in an air tight tub and there you are but how wrong I was!
Keeping springtails is a craft/skill just as much as keeping isopods, over the past few months I have given up on my fear of them escaping on me to now increase the ventilation on the top using the vents I also use for my isopods which I buy from Tom at exotic empire. This one change from going to just sealed tubs or tubs with drilled holes covered with organza truly changed my colonies seemingly overnight, I noticed how much more active they all were especially when it came to feeding, I also noticed they were more spread out - I am not sure if that means anything other than them just actively searching for food perhaps but it is something I didnt see as often in the old style enclosures.
In addition to this change when I created new tubs, I also fully changed the substrate/soil. The first time I cultured springtails I used topsoil which is a big no/go for me now, I found in topsoil it to be often home to worms and other pests like mites which is very difficult to avoid. I now use a mixture of Arcadia Earthmix (which we use with all of our isopod colonies and have done for years) X Terrarium premium substrate (ABG mix) from Grow Tropicals which is actually located very close to us in Leeds.
I was advised of this product actually by the SpingtailRanch on eBay as when I restarted a lot of my cultures I bought most from them and asked what substrate they kept their springtails in as I was very happy with the quality when they arrived.
Anyway, back to the slime - so I was seeing a lot of recommendations on Facebook about feeding springtails ‘slime’ so I asked within one of the WhatsApp groups where to get it from and Si from The Bug Room sent me a link for it on eBay and explained how easy it is to look after.
I received the pot on the 1st April and it is labelled as potted up on the 28th March, since receiving the slim I have watched in awe how quickly it seems to be growing in the petri dish it came in. Rapidly expanding like a scene from Venom as it takes over the tub including the lid and of course allover the oats that came with it. I noticed I think on the 3rd that some of the slime was going dark, I thought this may be it drying out so added a few drops of water and now on the 5th those brown spots have gone back yellow, I am not sure if that is the slime actually going back yellow or if new slime is just growing over the old one but I am yet to add more food yet and will continue just adding drops of water like this until the original oats are gone. This seems to be growing much quicker than I expected and although I have had it not even a week I am already debating splitting it into more dishes or feeding some off to the springtails. I will keep logging this and update you all as I progress with it and also start to actually use it as food for my various springtails.
If you would like to try some yourself, this is where I got mine from https://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/slimesupport
I will post another update on this next weekend and keep updating this in a thread