Should I be able to see my pods?

GothFishKeeper · Jul 20, 2024

Yesterday I added a 16oz jar of ecopods variety mix by algaebarn to my 13.5g fluval evo for the first time. I could tell there were some smaller (about 1 millimeter) pods floating around in the jar, but I didn’t see any larger adult ones. I added half the jar to my chaeto in the second AIO chamber and the other half to my display tank. I know the description on the website says that there’s also juveniles that are harder to see, but are they invisible to the naked eye? I can’t really check my chaeto for pods, but I don’t see anything at all in the display tank. Should I be worried that they didn’t survive the night?

DaJMasta · Jul 20, 2024

Copepods only get to 1-2mm long at the longest and are mostly clear, so they will be hard to spot. The way to see them would be to take a flashlight and shine it horizontally across the glass/water column at night and look for little specks on the glass, rocks, or sand. They also will likely prefer the textured surfaces, where they'll be harder to spot, and there's a massive amount of habitat for them in a normal tank, so it could be just that the number added is small compared to the space available.

It's also fairly hard to kill them - aside from big shifts in salinity (I'm talking 10ppt at once), I don't know of much environmentally that will kill them if other things are living fine unless you've got something eating them. Provided they have some food (detritus, powdered food, diatoms on the substrate, phytoplankton, etc.), you should see noticeably more within a couple of weeks, since that's around a normal time for a new generation or two to fill in the numbers.

jeffmr4 · Jul 20, 2024

Also, not to be confused with amphipods which are larger.

Solo McReefer · Jul 20, 2024

Hold the jar up to the light

You'll see them

In your tank? Not really

Not until you fatten them up a bit

GothFishKeeper · Jul 20, 2024

DaJMasta said:
Copepods only get to 1-2mm long at the longest and are mostly clear, so they will be hard to spot. The way to see them would be to take a flashlight and shine it horizontally across the glass/water column at night and look for little specks on the glass, rocks, or sand. They also will likely prefer the textured surfaces, where they'll be harder to spot, and there's a massive amount of habitat for them in a normal tank, so it could be just that the number added is small compared to the space available.

It's also fairly hard to kill them - aside from big shifts in salinity (I'm talking 10ppt at once), I don't know of much environmentally that will kill them if other things are living fine unless you've got something eating them. Provided they have some food (detritus, powdered food, diatoms on the substrate, phytoplankton, etc.), you should see noticeably more within a couple of weeks, since that's around a normal time for a new generation or two to fill in the numbers.

Ah okay that makes sense, thank you so much for the info! I do have a pygmy wasp in my tank that eats pods but he’s slow and more crawls than swims so I don’t think he would have wiped them all out already (at least I hope so). As for the size, maybe I’m thinking of amphipods that are larger? At the LFS I work at though we have lots of pods of different kinds in our invert systems so I wonder if I was expecting a certain type that I’ve seen in there that isn’t included in the ecopods mix.