Culturing copepods

Well, my second job is with phyto and copepods.

What phyto are you culturing? What pods are you looking to culture? Do you have a setup already made? If not, what room/equipment do you have?

Hmmm... Nanno isn't going to cut it with copepods. The outer skin is too tough for them to penetrate and consume and they usually pass it whole. BUT it works great in a copepod culture to "clean up" the water. Great ammonia consumers.

Chlorella is a freshwater species and I actually don't have any experience with it. The phytos I dealt with were

• Nannocloropsis oculata
• Isochrysis galbana
• Tetraselmis chuii
• Rhodomonas lens

I would personally grow single species copepod cultures. I don't have any experience with multi-species cultures so I don't know the ins and outs of one. Never really heard of someone doing it that way, but I can not say it can't be done.... I just never heard of it.

I'm going to go look at the site you referenced to see what species they included.

Go with the 10 gallon tank to culture your copepods.

Okay wait.... were you just thinking you were growing a phyto culture and that was a total separate entity from the copepod culture? Phyto is THEE best food for copepods. They can't be cultured together because th ecopepods will crash your culture. Think of it as food. You throw your pods in a tank with a lovely and cheap sponge filters. Feed the nice phyto to the 10g and your pod population should do very well. When you want some pods, grab out the sponge filter and squeeze it into another container of saltwater, and there ya go, food for .... whatever.

Can't think of a reason why you couldn't do it to your split bottles, except volume. You're not going to be able to culture very many pods in that volume. Lemme through out out to the Bossman and I'll see what they say. But phyto cultures can crash on their own, especially when thick. You'd be losing a pod culture with it.

The Nanno won't be good as a food item, but I think Chlorella is pretty nutritious, but where it is a freshwater species I don't have any experience with it. It is very tolerant, as I'm sure you have discovered, of saltwater conditions, but it is still a freshwater species and we dealt with marine.

Where your plan is not longevity with your phyto, you could mix the 2 (Chorella and nanno) in a common container before adding the pods. Just don't mix the species while culturing them. Does that make sense? That way you provide food and a "clean up crew" of sorts.

I wouldn't go with the mixed copepods. They have single species of Tisbe pods... I would go for that.

YW. I still think you will get better numbers out of a 10 gallon.

Isochrysis (medium difficult), Tetraselmis (Easy) and Rhodomonas (difficult). If you dose your Nanno (easy) with the Tetra it will cover everything in your tank. Your cultures will grow with the tetra and go nuts with the Iso and Rhodo.

You can also grow pods in your sump automatically with almost no effort on your part. In my sump, the water flows in on the right and out on the left. First it goes through a cotten filter laying on top of a drip plate. (I change the filter every morning to avoid creating a nitrate factory - - you would not believe the amount of brown crud that it catches in just 24 hours! I wonder whether it's more effetive than my protien skimmer- but that's a topic for another thread.)

Under the drip plate I have a large section full of D.I.Y. rock rubble, through which the water must flow down and under a partition which is painted black to keep the rock rubble in relative darkness. It is this dark section of the sump that is my copepod farm.

Of course, they "escape" on a regular basis, which then takes them to the next section of the sump where they inhabit the cheato, despite the light, and the rocks under the cheato where it's not so bright. When they "escape" this part of the sump, they are then pumped up to the display tank, they then serve as food for the two fish I have that feed exclusively on pods.

All I ever did was "seed" the pod farm by turning off the sump pump, pouring in two packets of pods and leaving the pump off for a few minutes to give the pods time to find refuge before turning the sump pump back on. That was a long time ago. "Mandy" and "Rockface", my two pods eaters, have been happily growing larger ever since, so they must be getting plenty to eat, which means the pod farm must be producing pods.

I suppose I'll have to re-start my phyto cultures, if for no other reason than to feed the pods.

We should all share our different types of phyto!

Nano is great for rotifers and as ammonia consumer-as Cranberry said :)

www.ipsf.com This is were its at. Check them out!!!!

Just to re-ressurect an old thread: The pods that Cranberry recommends (and I second, if my opinion counts for beans) are the tisbe sp.... These are sold as Reef Pods on this site, for a cheaper price than livecopepods.com sells them for. I've used these for pod cultures as well, with great results. Tigger pods IMO don't do well in tropical tanks.

Ummmm, you've actually cultured these... that makes your opinions and information worth a whole LOAD of beans..... just saying.

Aw, I'm blushing.

Now I really need to try culturing phyto and rotifers. My blueberry gorg isn't doing so hot with plain oyster eggs; I'd like to give him live rotifers and see how that works.