Setting up copepod tank

Letting folks know we've been able to cull large numbers of Copepods for our display tank. So far so good. The culture is ugly but quite productive. If anyone is wondering if it's worth a try we succeeded with no prior experience. At least we have so far...

 

Care to post any pictures of what you did?

 

Also can you write up what steps you took or if you followed a guide online can you post a link to it?

 

Great thread. I will be following along.
One day I would give this a try.

 

Hi all,

Here is the link that we roughly followed:

http://www.brineshrimpdirect.com/c90/Raising-Live-Rotifers-Copepods-c199.html

We used a 5 gallon aquarium we had in a closet instead of a bucket. We also used an air stone, small heater and cheap fluorescent light that came as part of the 5 gallon set up. We use the heater because the room this tank is in stays pretty cool in the winter due to having many windows.

We started with the tank about 1/3 full of fresh salt water, one bottle of tigger pods, and some DT phytoplankton.

Basically it's been pretty casual (apologies for not being detail oriented here). When the color of the water goes to a semi-clear yellow/green we add some phytoplankton to make it darker (so we can't see through the tank easily). On average it's a very small amount of phytoplankton daily. I do this just to keep it routine. Otherwise I'm more likely to forget.

I add water to the tank to compensate for evaporation (eyeballing it) and when a foam appears on the top I add a gallon of fresh salt water to dilute waste. There is no filtration.

When the tank is full and the water needs refreshing (the foam has been my cue so far) I siphon the water out through a series of sieves to capture the pods and babies and replace the old water with fresh saltwater and more phytoplankton. Note I am using Rodi water for both top off and saltwater additions.

So far I've needed to do two water changes since starting the culture. I do suspect I am losing some pods in the water change (I don't think my smallest sieve will capture the smallest babies).

Perhaps it is clear that we are new to this. If anything it shows success is possible despite our low tech approach. I am sure folks with more time could do even better.

Hoping this helps.



Did I mention it is ugly?

 

Wow something weird happened there. My links got mixed up. I will have to rewrite this post when I have time. Sorry about this.

 

I think you mean grow.Cull is the selective slaughter of animals.
Good job!!

 

We are not experts at all, as the photo probably indicates.

However, this is what we did. This article got us started:

url=http://www.brineshrimpdirect.com/c9.../c90/Raising-Live-Rotifers-Copepods-c199.html

Advice here also helped.

In brief:

We used a 5 gallon tank we had in a closet rather than a bucket. We started by filling the tank 1/3 full of saltwater (all water is Rodi to start) at the same salinity as the display tank (1.026). We put in a bottle of tigger pods, some DT phytoplankton, a small heater (the tank is in a sun room that gets cold in the winter), and an air stone.

I top off the water for evaporation by eye balling it (maybe ours is not the example to follow!) When foam appears on the surface I add saltwater to dilute the toxins. We feed a small amount of phytoplankton daily (to keep the water cloudy green but not too dark. I do this daily just to prevent myself from forgetting.

When the tank fills up and gets funky I do a water change by running the tank water through a sieve to capture the pods and replace it with fresh salt water and start again. We've had to do this twice since beginning the culture.
It's ugly, but so far quite productive. The benefit of feeding the pods is that those that don't get eaten become part of the cuc.
As may be evident from this story, if we can do it anyone can. We're planning on setting up a second system to have some redundancy.
Hopefully others will be inspired to give it a go. It's not expensive to set up and we are able to keep our mandarin plump and happy.

 

We are now preparing to set up a second culture tank. The first set up is going really well -

We are harvesting hundreds of them every few days and the culture tank continues to produce a thriving population. Our mandarin is plump and happy.

So far so good.

 

very cool - thanks for sharing the details of what you're doing.