Creative or Scientifically Minded People I Have a Challenge For You

livinlifeinBKK

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I've decided to start breeding copepods on a mid-large scale project and I also happen to be a 3rd year university student which means next year I'll be required to complete a senior project. I'd like to use copepod culturing as a part of my big project but I need a specific, relevant topic to focus my study on. I have a couple ideas but would like to hear the ideas of more creative or scientifically minded individuals. What ideas can you guys think of that would involve copepod culturing? Keep in mind I have plenty of scientific equipment available to me at the university and professors willing to help with operating them correctly. I just would like to find a topic current to today's world that I could possibly even expand upon later in my education. I have plenty of time too. (I'm 3rd year and the project is due by the end of 4th year) Thank you guys for your ideas!
 

lapin

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Not sure about studies all ready completed but an idea would be to study the effects of global warming (temp, Co2 levels ect...) on population age break downs.
 

Nick428

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You can do a toxicity study effect of certain metals on the population. Maybe nickel, copper, zinc, tin, aluminum

Nutritional study diatoms vs maybe nannochloropsis or isochrysis
 

Reef and Dive

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What are your main questionsThat’s quite easy.

A good setup is to keep small jars culturing phyto (that grows faster than pods). Keep the flow with small air compressors but do not use stones on cooepod cultures because very small bubbles kill them, larger ones do not.

Feed phyto with light and NPK or F2 Guillard formula.

Each 2 days feed copepods with live plankton so that the bottle content is green but still transluscent.

Replenish harvested pod water with 1.024 salt water and remember to replenish RO for evaporated water (to do that easier I created a floating device with 1.024 saliniy, when it sinked I replenishd a little RO untill it went to the surface (needed to completely fill with 1.028 water to compensate for the plastic bootle buoyancy - picture below).

Do not ever contaminate phyto bottles with pods, otherwise they reproduce and turn that into another pod culture.

Did not use any temperature control neither light on pod cultures

Some reference pictures:

My simple salinity monitor device:
B6D7F473-5B61-43C0-B320-FC80456A8655.jpeg


A simple phyto setup I helped a friend to create for comercial purposes (cultivating so much he cultivates the pods and can’t even sell it all, and often jus dumps a little):
CA5B34D8-2820-4E01-869A-0DAE4516FD6A.jpeg


Guillard formula to cultivate phyto, NPK works as well:
C68CCC73-367C-4171-8768-F150D785DDCD.jpeg


Paper on phyto cultivation appended, I did not find among my library about pods.
 

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Reef and Dive

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A good study idea with important impact on the aquarium hobby would be just to check if bad copepods (like red bugs or white bugs) could survive as a contamination among these cultured pods (my hypothesis is that once there are no corals they cannot, but it would be great to verify that).
 
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livinlifeinBKK

livinlifeinBKK

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What are your main questionsThat’s quite easy.

A good setup is to keep small jars culturing phyto (that grows faster than pods). Keep the flow with small air compressors but do not use stones on cooepod cultures because very small bubbles kill them, larger ones do not.

Feed phyto with light and NPK or F2 Guillard formula.

Each 2 days feed copepods with live plankton so that the bottle content is green but still transluscent.

Replenish harvested pod water with 1.024 salt water and remember to replenish RO for evaporated water (to do that easier I created a floating device with 1.024 saliniy, when it sinked I replenishd a little RO untill it went to the surface (needed to completely fill with 1.028 water to compensate for the plastic bootle buoyancy - picture below).

Do not ever contaminate phyto bottles with pods, otherwise they reproduce and turn that into another pod culture.

Did not use any temperature control neither light on pod cultures

Some reference pictures:

My simple salinity monitor device:
B6D7F473-5B61-43C0-B320-FC80456A8655.jpeg


A simple phyto setup I helped a friend to create for comercial purposes (cultivating so much he cultivates the pods and can’t even sell it all, and often jus dumps a little):
CA5B34D8-2820-4E01-869A-0DAE4516FD6A.jpeg


Guillard formula to cultivate phyto, NPK works as well:
C68CCC73-367C-4171-8768-F150D785DDCD.jpeg


Paper on phyto cultivation appended, I did not find among my library about pods.
Hey, thanks for the detailed post! I'm actually attending university in Thailand so in order to make my project appeal even more to the professor who I can also go to with specific questions, I'm going to begin to culture copepod species native to Thai reefs. (This professor's work has been focused upon restoring and protecting Thailand's many reefs.) I'd even consider cultivating a few of the most prevalent species separately for possible comparison among them. So with that said, I now need to start the operation from step 1 -establishing the cultures of pods and I think culturing phyto to feed them would be a great idea! Then I can even feed the native pods of the reef the phyto most similar to their wild diet on the reef. What could I substitute for the Guillard's F2? Pretty sure I"m not going to be able to find that exact brand here...
 

Reef and Dive

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F/2 is a formula, not necessarily a specific comercial product. It can be manufactured or bought ready-to-go from many suppliers.

Information on Guillard F/2:

Guillard, R.R.L. 1975. Culture of phytoplankton for feeding marine invertebrates. pp 26- 60. In Smith W.L. and Chanley M.H (Eds.) Culture of Marine Invertebrate Animals. Plenum Press, New York, USA.

Guillard, R.R.L. and Ryther, J.H. 1962. Studies of marine planktonic diatoms. I. Cyclotella nana Hustedt and Detonula confervacea Cleve. Can. J. Microbiol. 8: 229-239.

 

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