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.

 

[Chris_from_SoCal]

Nannochlorpsis is pretty easy to keep. Maybe I can create a detailed thread about my approach soon.

That would be great to read.

 

[Chris_from_SoCal]

I made a short video since they are thriving in this small tank. I remove a bunch almost every day yet they keep multiplying. I have no complaints about this.

 

[kichimark]

Awesome. Can't beat live foods.

 

[CopepodsForSale Verified Sponsor]

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.

 

[Chris_from_SoCal]

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.

Thank you for posting such informative suggestions. Since my last post I have upgraded to two 5 gallon tanks. I have been moving most of the larger brine shrimp to one tank and have moved a lot of the copepods to the other. I am taking my time with the copepods so I still have plenty to keep adding to my main reef tank. So far both new tanks seem to be doing well.

Once I have everything moved I plan on cleaning the old tanks and using them to start more brine shrimp then move them to the larger one when they get big enough. Funny thing is I somehow have copepods in the small brine shrimp tank that are different than the other copepods. Not sure how that happened but it seems good.

The day before you posted I ordered a 50mg amount of Nannochloropsis so I can try phytos one more time. This doesn't seem like much but worth a try.

 

[Freenow54]

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.

Soon I hope

 

[martin.a]

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.

Hi Chris, do you mean the bottled Seachem Reef PhytoPlankton?

 

[EnterName]

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.

Soon I hope

Thanks for reminding me, the microscopy thread distracted me. I think I can put something together later with all the info you will need.

 

[martin.a]

Thanks for reminding me, the microscopy thread distracted me. I think I can put something together later with all the info you will need.

Yes, me too, please! I am getting starting cultures of:

• Nannochloropsis australis
• Tetraselmis Chuii
• Phaeodactylum Tricornutum

in a few days and am stating to get anxiety hits

 

[EnterName]

Thanks for reminding me, the microscopy thread distracted me. I think I can put something together later with all the info you will need.

Yes, me too, please! I am getting starting cultures of:

• Nannochloropsis australis
• Tetraselmis Chuii
• Phaeodactylum Tricornutum

in a few days and am stating to get anxiety hits

I will let you know here once the post is ready.

It's quite easy with Nannochlorpsis sp., but with Tetraselmis sp. and Phaeodactylum sp. it might depend a little bit more on the starter culture's purity.
Very often the quality is bad and you would need to isolate a more or less sterile culture before starting. This process requires specialized equipment and is very tedious, so buying a sterile culture would probably still be cheaper in the end.