Growing Copepods

[Chris_from_SoCal]

Getting back into the salt water world I find many things have changed over the years. I found out many fish love to chomp down on copepods. They are pretty expensive to order so I thought I would give a try at building my own little army of them to add to the tank.

I bought two small 2 Gallon tanks (closer to 2.5) to start growing live brine shrimp and copepods.

The fish go nuts for the brine shrimp and it is hard to keep them growing enough to keep them happy. So far this side has worked out quite well.

I added a Mandorine knowing it would want to munch on copepods and so far it is doing great. I have a feeding tube that I can suck a bunch of them in and blow them into the rock structure.

The small tank looks a little ugly but you can see they are breeding like crazy.

 

[EnterName]

Are you cultivating Phytoplankton as well, or do you feed them with some powder?

I might a copepod farm soon as well and wonder how much I have to scale my Phytoplankton production

 

[Chris_from_SoCal]

I feed them a half cap full of Reef Phyto Plankton every other day. With a tank this small I also have to add a lot of RO water to keep it to the level needed. Not a big deal.

I tried cultivating plankton but was not successful. The store bought works fine since I add it to my main tank anyway.

 

[EnterName]

I feed them a half cap full of Reef Phyto Plankton every other day. With a tank this small I also have to add a lot of RO water to keep it to the level needed. Not a big deal.

I tried cultivating plankton but was not successful. The store bought works fine since I add it to my main tank anyway.

Nannochlorpsis is pretty easy to keep. Maybe I can create a detailed thread about my approach soon. It's pretty cheap and very low maintenance.

I sometimes had like 50% of the water evaporate and was still able to get new cultures growing from a few drops of the old culture.

Other plankton species are more difficult, but for copepod cultivation Nannochlorpsis should do the trick.