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.
