Wow Joe, that was mighty helpful. I see that Zooplankton is your middle name..
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Originally Posted by THEJRC  as far as actively harvesting I guess my question would be do you have a reason to? |
I have a Sixline and a Red Scooter Blenny to provide for. I am paranoid that I haven't enough pods to go around for the Blenny.
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Typically they will find they're way into the display without problems (unless your running a needlewheel pump) and you will already have a pretty well established population in the display already.
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Yeah. The ones I have seen are in the slow-flow chamber of my
sump. They may not find there way up to the
DT unless dislodged. Dr. Adelaide Rhodes's website instructs its customers to vigorously shake the bottles of copepods before releasing them into the aquarium/refugium/vessel. I could periodically use a turkey baster to dislodge them from the walls to promote their "ascension".
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If you want to you can, but it might be easier to farm them elsewhere and let the sump critters stay sump critters... they do good there!
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Agreed.
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On the separate tank and harvesting... Welcome to what could be an addiction...
you could build a "pod collector" using a jar, a powerhead, some airline and screen as I used to. Scraping them off typcially damages them and doesnt do you much good.
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Understood.
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I've since found that manually siphoning using a peice of airline tubing and directing the tube to what I want to suck up has been pretty much the easiest way to harvest.
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What about the "shaking method". If the vessel was small enough to shake (like a jug), then wouldn't this be easier?
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If I'm harvesting from a culture and don't want to carry around the high nutrient water i'll use a 53um or a 250um plankton collector from http://florida-aqua-farms.com to catch the adults and dump the culture back in.
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Very cool site. Thanks. I'll have to dig through there...
The jar with powerhead and tubing was more of a goofball experiment that I thought twice about posting, it was quite the difficult to use contraption he he. I've found the squeeze pumps like those for camping kerosene and such work very very well, and probably the easiest thing I've found is to culture the critters in jugs with spigots at the bottom so no actual work is involved in hunting them down, just open spigot and pour! (in pointer to your first thought, your on the right track but yeah... that 10 was probably a lot handier than a new container)
The 10g tank was more of an experiment to see what life remained in some
LR I had from my ld 24g tank. The
LR was is dark >30ppm
Nitrate water at 70 degrees F for over 2 months with no circulation. Sees as if the peanut worms survived, and the algae is even rebounding (which to me makes the method of turning off your lights to rid algae quite questionable). The pods came in with the bath water, so to speak, of my 55g.
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I think I might have pictures or something up on the copepodgeek site Copepod Culture Handbook (slated for rework) | handbooks but that paper was drug over from a much earlier version and is in desperate need of rework... maybe I'll do that this weekend before the madness of reefstock hits next week.
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I am going to pour over this info this weekend. I may just culture pods at work since I have the work space...
