Culturing copepods

Lets say if i had a succesful phytoplankton culture up and running and it was dark green, would it be possible to buy a bottle of copepods and dump it into the culture, and they'll live there for a while and thrive on the phytoplankton and when there's a whole lot of them i could just add the bottle to my fuge/tank.

I ask because i added a bottle of pods to my fuge already but i have barely seen andy amphipods or copepods running around so maybe if a had a whole bit 2L bottle of em it would work better to start up the population in my tank

 

How long has it been since you introduced them? If you have rock or chaeto or something in your fuge they should multiply on their own. Just give it some time, they tend to fluctuate in number too it seems. At night, take a flashlight like well after lights out and look on your DT glass and see if you see things walkin around. You will probably get better growth from the fuge than a culture although I don't see why that wouldnt work. Culturing is probably better to keep a constant supply of food availabe if you have a mandarin to feed or something/

 

ya i agree if you have chaeto or lr in the fuge there probubly hiding in there. i have a POD farm thread and so does peredhil. what i used was a plastic tank like thing. put three shower poofs in it dumped a bottle of copepods in it and i feed them phytoplex and crushed up flake food every other day

 

Its been about 2 or 3 weeks since ive introduced them, i introduced them into the refugium and i have seen two amphipods walking around in the DT at night

 

do you have lr or chaeto?

 

yeah....protected areas like drew3 was asking about have more to do with their numbers than initial stocking. They grow like mad if they can.

 

Yeah i have both a big ball of chaeto taking up the entire space in the fug and piles of lr and live sand at the bottom

 

the pods are probubly just hiding in the chaeto i wouldnt worry about it