optimal food for copepods

fryman

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I've been culturing copepods the past couple months, apocyclops, tisbe and tig pods. I'm using tetraselmis phytoplankton (live) as feed.

Supposedly tig pods are the least productive of these three species, but my tig pod cultures are by far the most productive. I thought at first it was just because they are the largest and thus easiest to see. Tisbe clears the water really fast sometimes and seems to be doing ok but in the sieve it sure looks like there's a LOT more mass of tig pods than tisbe. I mean I get crazy tig pods. Apocyclops is barely maintaining and tisbe is just ok by comparison to tig.

Anyone done any testing on what's better feed for diff species of copepod cultures? I have some different phyto started now, but tetraselmis is my go to.
 

Dennis Cartier

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It is going to depend on the pods characteristics. Benthic pods that live on surfaces will do better with a type of food whereas pelagic pods that live in the water column will do better with other types of food. Of the 3 you have mentioned, tisbe and tig are benthic and Apocyclops is pelagic. I expect the foods you have tested favour benthic pods.

Several years ago there was a local pod supplier (Reef Crew?) here that provided Nitokra Lacustris pods. They were really unique in that they were epibenthic, the adults lived on surfaces whereas the napulii were pelagic. I had great success culturing those, but eventually my culture crashed due to negligence and the supplier ceased operations a few weeks before I needed to restart. I searched for another vendor selling them but have never been able to find them again. These were the species of pods that Adelaide Rhodes studied and wrote numerous papers on due to their applicability to high density culture. Those pods were awesome for culturing.

Dennis
 

ectoaesthetics

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I would check with reef nutrition if they don’t have the info on their site they will certainly share it. While they sell to the hobby they are really a commercial source of these things for labs and public aquariums.

what does your tigger pod setup look like?? I’ve always struggled with keeping them indoors for more than a few generations. I find that the fist crop does well but levels off from there (30-45 days of production). Are you tank, airline, live phyto, and light?
 
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fryman

fryman

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Reef nutrition uses a blend of different phyto. I will likely try that but was hoping to keep it simple.

My setup is 5x 2 gallon tea dispensers with 4 marinepure balls and rigid airline ~1 bubble per second. I add 200ml live tetraselmis per day using a doser. There is also an led strip on 16hr lighting schedule. After 1 to 1.5 weeks (when jar is full) I harvest half of the culture using the spout.

At the start the culture water stayed pretty green but now the water is pretty much clear. I started also with no dosing just filled the jar with green water and added tig pods. They take 2 - 4 weeks to clear the water and maybe aren't quite as productive this way but still nets plenty of pods and is easy to setup.

All the jars are next to each other and I use gloves but cross-contamination is happening anyway. My apocyclops culture appears to have turned into a tig culture, so either I got a bad batch of apo pods or they can't survive on tetraselmis. The tisbe cultures still have tisbe pods but have been contaminated with rotifers, which is interesting since I didn't think rotifers would survive on tetraselmis alone. I didn't find rotifers in the tig cultures. Maybe tig pods eat rotifers?
 

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