You could do it on NGM plates, then you can pick up eggs as soon as the worm corpses decay. In liquid, you may want to optimize your condition where the delay and the egg viability would balance.
Shin Murakami : Thanks a lot for your answer. Can you please tell me how you pick up eggs from NGM plates? Also, what do you mean by "the delay and the egg viability would balance" ?
One way to minimize having dead adult worms is to wash them off the plates before you collect the eggs for bleaching.
Or if you really can't have any dead worms, then you put a few mature hermophrodites on a new NGM plate, let them lay eggs for a few hours, then remove the adults, then harvest & bleach. Tedious, but it works.
Hello Sara shohdy Thabit ,
I agree with Katie's suggestions.
Alternatively, a less tedious strategy (but more risky for the eggs) is to prolong the exposure to bleach or bleach concentration. In my experience, different worm strains display different resistance to digestion through bleach, meaning that everytime you use a new worm strain you should optimize the parameters mentioned before. For convenience, generally the time of exposure to bleach is the variable parameter. You should try to visually detect the moment at which your worms are almost fully digested and start the precipitation of the eggs. Of course the viability of the eggs might be partially reduced but you will get rid of the adult worms corpses.
Mario Romani : Thanks a lot for your comment, It is really valuable and helpful.
When I bleach there are usually very few dead worms remaining in the population. We used 2:1 bleach:NaOH shaken vigorously by hand for 5 minutes. Perhaps you do this less long?
Dear Lucas Mergan : Actually when I do this, eggs do not hatch. Do you think I should decrease shaking time or bleach:NaOH ratio?
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