Phytoplankton Cultivating

[TJ42]

3 weeks? What species are you cultivating?

Tetraselmis, I may not have to and haven't been doing this long. I know it is really dark when I bottle it.

 

[Tritie]

I’ve been running phytoplankton cultures for the past two years and have had great success maintaining healthy growth. It’s good that you switched to airstones, using rigid airline tubing is generally the preferred method for bubbling phyto cultures.

For my setup, I mix 2-parts saltwater to 1-part RODI water and run my lighting schedule for 16 hours daily. I also add 1 ml of F/2 fertilizer per liter of water. If your culture is around 9 days old and growth seems slow or stagnant, try adding a bit more fertilizer to provide more food.

Here are a few tips I’ve found helpful:

• Sterilize your equipment thoroughly. I use rubbing alcohol to clean everything before starting new cultures.
• Start with a trusted, single-species culture. My favorites are Mercer’s Montana strains. Tetra or Nanno are both excellent choices and tend to be the easier strands of phyto to culture.
• Avoid over-diluting your starter culture. If the initial tint is too light, it can take a long time to darken. Starting with a richer tint usually produces extremely dark green phyto for me, so dense you can’t even see your hand’s shadow through the glass.

Where did you get these culture vessels?

 

[kevinf]

Where did you get these culture vessels?

I bought some jars off amazon

Right hand jar is the tan/brown phytoplankton(I forget the name). First time trying to culture that species.

I usually culture the green phyto (on the left). I think I've been growing the green for about months now. Super easy

 

[Coralogy_]

I’ve been running phytoplankton cultures for the past two years and have had great success maintaining healthy growth. It’s good that you switched to airstones, using rigid airline tubing is generally the preferred method for bubbling phyto cultures.

For my setup, I mix 2-parts saltwater to 1-part RODI water and run my lighting schedule for 16 hours daily. I also add 1 ml of F/2 fertilizer per liter of water. If your culture is around 9 days old and growth seems slow or stagnant, try adding a bit more fertilizer to provide more food.

Here are a few tips I’ve found helpful:

• Sterilize your equipment thoroughly. I use rubbing alcohol to clean everything before starting new cultures.
• Start with a trusted, single-species culture. My favorites are Mercer’s Montana strains. Tetra or Nanno are both excellent choices and tend to be the easier strands of phyto to culture.
• Avoid over-diluting your starter culture. If the initial tint is too light, it can take a long time to darken. Starting with a richer tint usually produces extremely dark green phyto for me, so dense you can’t even see your hand’s shadow through the glass.

Where did you get these culture vessels?

Got these ones from ikea and just drilled a hole through the top. I have since switched over to gallon jars, which I found on amazon (https://a.co/d/hGTQHwG).

 

[kobe6710]

Update: got some darker color!! Thanks to everyone that helped and it’s awesome seeing a lot of others benefit from all the information provided.

I do have some die off (maybe?) at the bottom of each jar. It’s pretty minimal, I stir the mason jars a bit and it disappears for a couple hours. No foul smell and I’ve been adding f2 once a week.

Should I wait until it gets darker or am I good to harvest soon? I also plan to sterilize each container after harvesting as they’ve been running for about 3 weeks each.

 

[Tritie]

For 2 months my turf algae had finally started to abate, to the point where once a week I just did a few spot treatments in tank. Prior to that I was pulling full rock scapes out 1-2 times a month and peroxide treating them with a scrub brush (and keeping corals moist with tank water in a pipette). Rocks were just covered! It was awful. I was dosing small amounts of phos (0.33mL of neophos in a 70 gallon system daily, into a DND denitrator) at that time because my phos was always 0 on test kits and even critically low on Fauna Marin ICP tests. I was also dosing ferrion. When I stopped dosing all that, turf stopped growing like crazy. We are talking about a reduction of almost 80% coverage to just a few small spots a week (<1%). Now that I have been dosing 30mL phyto daily for about 3 weeks, turf coverage has increased to about 15%. I don't want to stop dosing phyto because it feeds pods and coral, but i do not want to deal with this turf again. Any idea how I can filter out the culture water?

 

[dthom]

Update: got some darker color!! Thanks to everyone that helped and it’s awesome seeing a lot of others benefit from all the information provided.

I do have some die off (maybe?) at the bottom of each jar. It’s pretty minimal, I stir the mason jars a bit and it disappears for a couple hours. No foul smell and I’ve been adding f2 once a week.

Should I wait until it gets darker or am I good to harvest soon? I also plan to sterilize each container after harvesting as they’ve been running for about 3 weeks each.

Do you have a light that you keep close to the jars? Can you share a picture with the light on? They still seem a little light to me, but hard to tell with the lower light

 

[dthom]

Also, as far as harvesting, I would only harvest 1 jar at a time and wait several days before harvesting the other jar. Since the culture still looks a little thin (lite) I would personally do a 50% starter on your next culture. Also, when you harvest I would filter your culture water. I used to use the disposable coffee filters. Just keep them clean and in a sealed Ziplock bag or something to avoid contamination. So basically you pour the culture our of the jar through the filter and into another serial container. Then clean and serialize your culture jar or have a new jar ready. To start your new culture, you normally fill the clean sterile jar 25 to 30% of the way up with your just harvested culture. Since it is a little thin, I would fill the new jar up more. Probably just under 1/2 full. Maybe 40%. Then top it off with fresh sterile saltwater, and add your f2 fertilizer. When harvesting don't stir up all the junk that settled to the bottom. Try and leave it in the jar and dispose of it. That is also why you run the harvest through the filter. Hopefully that made sense!

 

[Hawaiian AQ]

For prevention of contamination, use wine jugs or glass vessels with restricted necks/small mouths over wide mouth jars. You can get them at your grocery store or Amazon for a few bucks.You can seal them off with a rubber stopper with some small holes drilled through so a glass pippette can be inserted. You’ll need a second hole for an exhaust and you should cover that with a piece of gauze or the like. It will stay clean tho since air is exiting. Incoming air should be filtered with a disc filter of 0.2 micron. This is critical.

 

[kobe6710]

Update: got some darker color!! Thanks to everyone that helped and it’s awesome seeing a lot of others benefit from all the information provided.

I do have some die off (maybe?) at the bottom of each jar. It’s pretty minimal, I stir the mason jars a bit and it disappears for a couple hours. No foul smell and I’ve been adding f2 once a week.

Should I wait until it gets darker or am I good to harvest soon? I also plan to sterilize each container after harvesting as they’ve been running for about 3 weeks each.

A have a full spectrum grow light aimed right at the jars which is positioned just less than 2 feet away because it is also pointed at my ficus bonsai tree

Light is coming from above/behind the camera lens which might make the phyto seem brighter than what it is.

I am aiming for a bit of a deeper green as I’d say the culture is about 80% as dark as the phytoplankton which I had initially purchased. I harvested the culture on the left today and I will sterilize, split, and fertilize the other culture in a day or so.

I will send a pic soon

 

[kobe6710]

Also, as far as harvesting, I would only harvest 1 jar at a time and wait several days before harvesting the other jar. Since the culture still looks a little thin (lite) I would personally do a 50% starter on your next culture. Also, when you harvest I would filter your culture water. I used to use the disposable coffee filters. Just keep them clean and in a sealed Ziplock bag or something to avoid contamination. So basically you pour the culture our of the jar through the filter and into another serial container. Then clean and serialize your culture jar or have a new jar ready. To start your new culture, you normally fill the clean sterile jar 25 to 30% of the way up with your just harvested culture. Since it is a little thin, I would fill the new jar up more. Probably just under 1/2 full. Maybe 40%. Then top it off with fresh sterile saltwater, and add your f2 fertilizer. When harvesting don't stir up all the junk that settled to the bottom. Try and leave it in the jar and dispose of it. That is also why you run the harvest through the filter. Hopefully that made sense!

Thank you for the coffee filter suggestion. I will do this when splitting and sterilizing the next culture

 

[kobe6710]

For prevention of contamination, use wine jugs or glass vessels with restricted necks/small mouths over wide mouth jars. You can get them at your grocery store or Amazon for a few bucks.You can seal them off with a rubber stopper with some small holes drilled through so a glass pippette can be inserted. You’ll need a second hole for an exhaust and you should cover that with a piece of gauze or the like. It will stay clean tho since air is exiting. Incoming air should be filtered with a disc filter of 0.2 micron. This is critical.

I will look into this. I do want my cultures to be a bit cleaner in the long run

 

[Hawaiian AQ]

Thank you for the coffee filter suggestion. I will do this when splitting and sterilizing the next cultu

you shouldn’t have debris or biological clumps in your cultures at any point really. At least that isn’t your aim. The filtering out stuff really shouldn’t be happening unless you’re working with contaminants from the beginning. Typically you start clean and try to run clean as long as you can or through your upscale. If contamination occurs, standard practice is to discard. That’s why on a commercial level, everything is done in replicates. Only the beast are selected to move forward and the rest are dumped. Now, if you don’t have the space or resources or access to clean culture to begin, nor is a livelihood or wellbeing of animals dependent upon your algae, let it ride I suppose. I could write up a detailed primer on how to do this small scale if people would have an interest in that. Growing good, clean, dense algae that’s nutritious really isn’t difficult, expensive or labor intensive but you must understand the basics

 

[AlohaReef]

you shouldn’t have debris or biological clumps in your cultures at any point really. At least that isn’t your aim. The filtering out stuff really shouldn’t be happening unless you’re working with contaminants from the beginning. Typically you start clean and try to run clean as long as you can or through your upscale. If contamination occurs, standard practice is to discard. That’s why on a commercial level, everything is done in replicates. Only the beast are selected to move forward and the rest are dumped. Now, if you don’t have the space or resources or access to clean culture to begin, nor is a livelihood or wellbeing of animals dependent upon your algae, let it ride I suppose. I could write up a detailed primer on how to do this small scale if people would have an interest in that. Growing good, clean, dense algae that’s nutritious really isn’t difficult, expensive or labor intensive but you must understand the basics

I would be interested in the small scale setup. I mean very small scale. 2-3 2 liter bottles is my current amount and produces more than I need. Wouldn't mind learning how to set up for greater success.

 

[Batman222b]

For prevention of contamination, use wine jugs or glass vessels with restricted necks/small mouths over wide mouth jars. You can get them at your grocery store or Amazon for a few bucks.You can seal them off with a rubber stopper with some small holes drilled through so a glass pippette can be inserted. You’ll need a second hole for an exhaust and you should cover that with a piece of gauze or the like. It will stay clean tho since air is exiting. Incoming air should be filtered with a disc filter of 0.2 micron. This is critical.

Following this tread. I'm trying to grow t-iso. Small batches to start. What kind of lights and containers do you recommend? Was talking to a guy tonight that's using 5k, 3k, red, and blue LED. Where do I get this from? I'm new to this type of phyto and have tried twice with no success. What's a good schedule?

 

[Hawaiian AQ]

Strip light LED. 5-10k. 10 k is my preferred

1 gallon glass wine jugs with tapered neck

What do you mean good schedule?

 

[Batman222b]

Strip light LED. 5-10k. 10 k is my preferred

1 gallon glass wine jugs with tapered neck

What do you mean good schedule?

Ok. With the strip, you don't have any concerns about intensity? Just adhere right to the jug?

Schedule meant hours on and hours off.

Thanks!

 

[Batman222b]

Strip light LED. 5-10k. 10 k is my preferred

1 gallon glass wine jugs with tapered neck

What do you mean good schedule?

Why 10 K?

 

[Hawaiian AQ]

Why 10 K?

Preference. It’s a particular light strip I use and it does well on all my starter cultures. The ambient light is easier on the eye. Low kelvin lights are very yellow

 

[Batman222b]

Why 10 K?

Preference. It’s a particular light strip I use and it does well on all my starter cultures. The ambient light is easier on the eye. Low kelvin lights are very yellow

So you are attaching the strips to your growing containers?