BBS eating dead phytoplankton?

[SeaHorseQueen]

Hey Everyone, so I found something interesting and wondered if anyone has had this happen to them? So my copepod culture is doing excellent and overloaded the 5g tank that I’ve had to harvest more than once a week to keep the population stable. Of course that means a very well fed happy mandarin dragonet. I’ve also been hatching fresh BBS for him too. A while back, I was harvesting from both cultures and now I have a tank full of adult brine shrimp with the copepods. I’m honestly shocked because even though they filter feed, I didn’t think they ate dead phytoplankton too. So now I have probably a couple hundred in there with thousands of pods. Anyone cultured bbs with phytoplankton?

 

[blaxsun]

A well-fed mandarin is a happy mandarin. Mine has worked his way up from pure copepods to brine shrimp and calanus.

 

[Jay'sReefBugs]

Hey Everyone, so I found something interesting and wondered if anyone has had this happen to them? So my copepod culture is doing excellent and overloaded the 5g tank that I’ve had to harvest more than once a week to keep the population stable. Of course that means a very well fed happy mandarin dragonet. I’ve also been hatching fresh BBS for him too. A while back, I was harvesting from both cultures and now I have a tank full of adult brine shrimp with the copepods. I’m honestly shocked because even though they filter feed, I didn’t think they ate dead phytoplankton too. So now I have probably a couple hundred in there with thousands of pods. Anyone cultured bbs with phytoplankton?

Brine and copepods will eat dead phyto without issue . On the other side of things your going to lose the copepods most likely in that culture as the brine will out compete them . Best to keep them separate as much as possible

 

[SeaHorseQueen]

Brine and copepods will eat dead phyto without issue . On the other side of things your going to lose the copepods most likely in that culture as the brine will out compete them . Best to keep them separate as much as possible

It actually wasn’t intended to mix them. I was harvesting both at the same time but I actually wasn’t expecting the bbs to survive.

 

[Reef Nutrition]

Hey Everyone, so I found something interesting and wondered if anyone has had this happen to them? So my copepod culture is doing excellent and overloaded the 5g tank that I’ve had to harvest more than once a week to keep the population stable. Of course that means a very well fed happy mandarin dragonet. I’ve also been hatching fresh BBS for him too. A while back, I was harvesting from both cultures and now I have a tank full of adult brine shrimp with the copepods. I’m honestly shocked because even though they filter feed, I didn’t think they ate dead phytoplankton too. So now I have probably a couple hundred in there with thousands of pods. Anyone cultured bbs with phytoplankton?

Artemia (brine shrimp) will eat all kinds of things including dead algae. We have customers that only feed dead algae and lipid enrichment to their brine shrimp with excellent results.

Thanks for bringing this up because there is a broad misconception that live algae is the only thing that works for zooplankton cultures like brine shrimp, copepods and rotifers.

Chad

 

[AngryInch]

Interesting