Once your embryos have been rinsed free of the inviable and dying eggs and debris, place them in a clean sterile container where you intend to hold them until they are ready to settle out.
The larvae tend to collect at the surface and along the sides of the container so it is important to pick a vessel with steep smooth walls. Since the larvae collect at the surface it is also advantageous to select a vessel which is shallow with a large surface area.
At this point there are two routes you can use to raise your embryos to larval hood.
You can raise them manually in an unfiltered container which will need to be agitated fairly often and which will need to have manual water changes 2-10 times a day, depending on the conc. of your embryos/larvae. This method has a high success rate but it is very labor intensive, especially right after the spawn. As the larvae grow and metabolize their fat they can foul the water very rapidly.
the other method is to grow larvae in flow through vessels. for this method I opted to design a very large filtration sleeve with nytek nylon filter material covering a cylindrical frame. 100um should work well for both species. Since palmata larvae are 300um long it is tempting to use 250um screen for their containers but this is not advisable. with 250um screen palmata larvae will get stuck in the mesh making them very hard to remove and smaller larvae and embryos will slip through. Besides, diploria eggs are in the 150um range so if you confuse your mesh sizes you will lose alot of larvae. the following image shows one of the conatiners we used for raising palmata larvae.
Well in advance of the spawning event (2-3 months) you should place your settlement substrate of choice (preferably limestone tiles or something similar) on a clean healthy reef where some biofilm and crustose
coralline algae can grow and cover the settlement substrate.
sorry for the poorly organized post but I just wanted to post something while I had the time. I have more to say about innoculating the larvae, maintaining the larval vessels and finally the settlement but I have to go to work now so I will post more as soon as I get a chance.
