My Tig pods are always easily visible. Tisbe pods being much smaller need a flashlight to see but are also visible to the naked eye. The only time I can't see mine with a flashlight is when the media is especially dense with phytoplankton.
Microscope yes, Sedgewick no. Even with those it seems it would be near impossible to obtain a drop of water with a representative concentration of organisms. Phyto I could see but pods are quite active on the slide and also seem to congregate near the bottom and outsides of their container. I'm thinking I'll just have to let experience and my flashlight guide me.
In case you are curious, you have been doing it for a year now;
This is the one I used:
Ha not an affeliate link lol
This is how I do it and it is from Reef Nutrition:
I harvest mine monthly with a 50% water change but otherwise haven't been been doing water changes. Maybe I should start occasionally siphoning the "gunk" off the bottom and topping off with fresh sw. I worry about losing pods and eggs but perhaps that's what you mean by, "lose pods to win some"?
You sound like a pro so I have a related question for you. I hear a great deal about the benefit of copepods but very little about amphipods. Would you recommend adding these to a tank?
Yeah, Tanknicians posted a video basically stating people were wasting their money continuing to add pods to a tank without the special circumstances you described. Their point was whether added or not they'll reach an equilibrium population. My tank is relatively young, 16mo., and has experienced dinos several times so for now I'll keep adding pods, phyto. and bacteria.
That gunk is called mulm and most of your nauplii reside in that be careful removing to much of it . It's not pretty but plays a important role in culturing .
Thanks for the input. In my case it looks mostly like dead phyto but I'll definitely keep that in mind. btw, it would appear my Tig cultures are dying off while my Tisbes are still doing well. Thinking of switching to all Tisbe. Is there any reason to order more Tigs and go through the lengthy process of building up a significant volume of them vs just adding Tisbe.
Tigs are a stand alone food source for fish . They don't reproduce well or survive long in home reef aquariums . Tisbe would be the way to go IMO
How is this write up coming? I use 3g containers that look like shoe boxes. I've done water changes and strain everything through a 55m sieve. All that crap at the bottom stays in the sieve. I've read to keep 30% of it. I'm not sure how to do so though. I suppose that I could strain just the water first and then scoop out some and add it to a new vessel.
I to would like an update. I have two 3g culture vessels and am currently thoroughly cleaning one harvesting one each month and splitting the other. Considering letting them go longer and using my Hanna ammonia tester to monitor. In the past I've found total ammonia levels around 0.10 to 0.15 after one month. Problem is I'm not sure what level the ammonia would need to rise to to be an issue, and if ammonia build up is the only issue to be concerned with.
I did a little more research on this last night. RN runs a batch for 80 days and does a 100% reset. When I started, I didn't have mulm and it started to collect after about a week. This seems like the safest route to follow, although it will set you back a bit without the mulm. I found this on another thread. I ordered a 250 and 120 from Mercer last night. I already have a 53:
