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.
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.
Really nice setup, and the thing you are doing that most people miss is harvesting almost every day. That is not just taking your share out, it is actively driving the production. A culture that gets thinned regularly stays in fast growth mode, because you are always leaving them room and food to reproduce into. Cultures that get left alone hit their ceiling, stop reproducing, and start crashing on their own waste. So the fact that you pull a bunch daily and they keep multiplying is not a coincidence, that is cause and effect.
On feeding, here is the rhythm I would use rather than a fixed schedule. Dose phyto until the water is faintly tinted green, then feed again when it goes clear. Clear water means they ate it all, which means they are food limited and could be producing more. In a small dense culture like yours you may find you are feeding well past every other day once you start watching it that way. Half a cap on a two gallon that is breeding hard is probably leaving production on the table.
The other thing worth adding if you have not is a gentle air line, no airstone, just a slow stream of coarse bubbles. It keeps oxygen up, keeps the phyto suspended where the pods can get it, and stops that surface film from forming. It makes a bigger difference to density than most people expect.
On the phyto culture not taking, Nannochloropsis is the one to start with. It is close to bulletproof. When people fail with it, it is almost always one of a few things. Not enough light, and it needs to be bright and close to the vessel, basically around the clock. No aeration, since without bubbles moving the cells around and supplying CO2 it just stalls out. Starting too dilute, so a heavy inoculation beats a few drops into a big jug. Or overdosing fertilizer, since more is not better. Get those four right and Nanno is genuinely hard to kill.
And to answer the scaling question, the honest way to size it is to work backwards from consumption rather than guess. Watch how fast your pod culture clears the water, and that tells you your daily phyto demand. Then run two culture vessels on a rotation rather than one big one, harvesting half and topping back off, so you always have a mature dense culture ready while the other rebuilds. A single vessel that you keep pulling from just gets progressively thinner and eventually cannot keep up. Two rotating is the whole trick.
That mandarin is a good test of the system too. If it is staying fat, your production is genuinely keeping pace, which is a real achievement on a tank that size. Have a great rest of your weekend!! Always happy to help.
