Rotifers and Copepods Culturing

Hi all

Just wondering if anyone cultures their own live Rotifers and Copepods here.

I do my own Rotifers at the moment and will be starting my Copepods in the next couple of weeks. They are very expensive in the UK to buy from the LFS and personally I use around 2½ Litres a week.

Be interesting the techniques and setups you guys use.

 

Just a quick bump lots of views but no replies, does no one here culture their own Rotis and pods?

 

If you do a search I am sure something will come up in the forum. If the person is still here.

 

I used to culture my own pods before I made the switch to a fuge style sump. It's not hard to do; I used a 2.5 gallon tank with a clip-on light and a cheapie airstone for water movement. Cost will depend on how dedicated you are to culturing the "food." I used greenwater for their culture medium instead of flakes like some people use....IMO it keeps the water chemistry more stable than with flakes rotting on the bottom. I used store-bought live phyto (DT's IIRC) and fed them a tablespoonfull or two every week. You will know when to feed more when the water starts to clear up! You can save money by culturing your own greenwater. I started with a bag of 200+ pods by "reefpods" brand, and harvested tons of pods weekly from this setup. The nice thing was that the pod harvest also helped facilitate weekly water changes....by the time I was done harvesting, the little tank would need a half-gallon of fresh seawater to top it off, so my culture water stayed in good shape.

 

Cheers Nova

I have a separate culture station and produce top quality rotis and that way I can also monitor how many are going in
I grow them in plastic sweet jars with a rigid airline pumping 1 bubble every 2 seconds and feed them live phyto.

As for pods I will be starting this next week, I already have good reproduction in my fuge but I want to culture them deliberatly to ensure things like my scooters get enough

Anyway thank for the replies.

 

I have stopped culturing copepods, amphipods and mysid shrimp as the time to produce wasn't cost effective timewise for the quantities I use. It was too much for too little when you consider how easy it is to culture rotifers and brine shrimp.
My main application is seahorse and seahorse fry and since these two, when enriched with Dan's Food with Beta Glucan (seahorsesource.com), satisfy the needs I have, there isn't any incentive for me to culture less productive foods any longer.
I use blended powdered spirulina for rotifer culturing and for brine cultures after the first week of growth. (live nanno for the first week or so of brine culture)
When culturing most pod forms, tray type containers work better than tank types.
For my reef tanks, however, I don't add pod life as such, but enhance the growth of existing pod life by a once a week feeding of nanno, followed a couple of days afterwards with a feeding of rotifers.
I do this at night after lights out.
It's my feeling that pod life was much more enhanced once I started feeding the enriched rotifers compared to when I first started the nanno feeding, but I have no way to document the differences.

 

Ugh, I tip my hat to anyone who takes the time to culture live mysids. I certainly wouldn't want to. When I was culturing pods I was doing it as an experiment more than anything else to see how easy or difficult it would be. I did some rotis on the side as well; I'd say those two are very simple to culture. I've never bothered to culture amphipods (those buggers multiply just FINE on their own in my tanks!) and after reading up on the difficulties regarding mysids, I didn't even want to try.

RayJay, what seahorses do you breed? I kept a breeding pair of H. reidi for almost two years before I had a vibrio infection wipe them out. I never really tried raising the young - I wasn't set up for pelagic fry. Right now I have a female wild-caught southern H. erectus that I just got trained to frozen PE mysis. In fact she just learned what her food bowl was 2 days ago...now I can hardly get her out of it even if there's no food in the bowl!!

 

To date I've only reared and sold reidis.
I'm waiting on an order of 4 pairs of erectus and 4 pairs of dwarfs that is originating at seahorsecorral.com and being sent to Canada, but paperwork has been about four months waiting at this point.
I buy TRUE captive bred seahorses so that I don't have to deworm like wildcaught, tank raised, and net pen raised require for best chances of success.
I too have had multiple vibriosis problems as you can read in the "My Thoughts" link on my seahorse page.
Also on that page is a link to my reidi rearing page near the bottom.
MY SEAHORSE PAGE

 

OK, I know of seahorse corral. Not ordered from them, but I know a couple people who have. Once of my online buddies has a remarkable black and pearl white horse from them that really looks amazing. I don't think I've heard of a negative ordering experience from them, in fact. I can imagine the difficulties involved in getting the horses from down here all the way up to Canada....heck, I live 4 hours away from seahorse corral, and even closer to seahorse source.com.
If you want to brave the thread, I just finished posting my build thread for the seahorse tank right here.

Just out o curiosity, where did you buy your mysid stock when you were in the habit of culturing them?

 

I did for about 8weeks but not cause i wanted to but i had a 10g tank with sand and rock and nothing else and they just went nuts in there. I had probably 5000-7000 in thare but i shut it down and gave the tank to my little brothers betta fish.