Your cultures look fine to me.
Tisochrysis lutea is great, but also a little more difficult. But it can be grown with hobby-grade equipment. I have some tiso backups in 2 liter soda bottles that have been going at least a year.
Thanks for all the phyto information. Now that I've done what I've done I can either leave that first bottle go and see what happens, or go ahead and split it. I don't believe I should harvest it since I just added more F2 today. I can't imagine adding plant fertilizer to your display would be a good thing.
Thank you for sharing. I have looked at mine under a scope and it is definitely Tetraselmis. I use a scope to check density and for contamination regularly, and it's 100% Tetraselmis. I used to harvest mine every 7 days, but raised the lights higher and now harvest every 10. I also start my cultures over each harvest, using whatever is left in the refrigerator from the batch prior to that harvest.So I'm gonna share some advice, based on my experience, because I'm seeing some things in this thread that I don't believe are correct.
I've attached pics of nannochloropsus and tetraselmis, and cyanobacteria from the genus synnecochoccus. Notice they are all green?
When phyto cultures get very dense, the pH will rise. When pH reaches ~9, nanno and tetraselmis stop growing. They will not get appreciably more dense, and you need to harvest. This is assuming you are not controlling pH, which can be done using CO2 injection.
Synnecochoccus will continue growing at >9pH. It also grows faster than nanno or tet, and can reach crazy high density. Basically the culture will turn almost black. And in my experience, cyanobacteria contamination is inevitable. If you haven't seen it yet, it's because you haven't been growing phyto long enough. Or you don't know how to recognize it, since it basically still looks like green water.
So in my experience, if you are growing very dense phyto, it's probably turned into synnechoccus. Some of the pics in this thread are almost certainly cyanobacteria.
I anticipate some may not want to hear this. That's ok. Feel free to explain logically, preferably based on your own data, why I may be mistaken.
That's great! The naked eye ime is not reliable to tell the difference but I woulda bet that milk jug was too dense to be tetraselmis. It looked at least as dense as co2 infused tet in that pic. I'm happy to be wrong in this case. Maybe growing under lower light intensity for longer time let's the pH stay lower, resulting in denser culture? When lights are off the pH will drop. What's your lighted cycle time?Thank you for sharing. I have looked at mine under a scope and it is definitely Tetraselmis. I use a scope to check density and for contamination regularly, and it's 100% Tetraselmis. I used to harvest mine every 7 days, but raised the lights higher and now harvest every 10. I also start my cultures over each harvest, using whatever is left in the refrigerator from the batch prior to that harvest.
I will say I use the Mercer of Montana F2, my Tetraselmis culture originally came from them, and I use their growing jars off amazon. Every jar is sanitized with undiluted bleach each harvest day, before being restarted.
I feed a large amount of this to my tanks with coral every day (1/2 gallon at a time to my 75 gallon), and my water clarity has improved, nitrates are dropping, copepod population is through the roof even with a bunch of wrasses and a mandarin, and the coral polyps are always open and feeding.
This is what happened within 72 hrs when I fed it to my 30 gallon tank without any corals...
This is about a week after adding a few live sponges, some gorgonians, and green star polyp. This tank was also seeded with a few thousand copepods when the water turned green.
Lit about 18 hrs at a time. Seems to do well that way. It's the cycle I used to use for my Isochrysis galbana 'Tahitian Gold', Tetraselmis suecica, Nannochloropsis oculata, Rhodomonas lens, and Thalassiosira weisfloggi cultures a few years ago when I grew phyto to sell.
Lit about 18 hrs at a time. Seems to do well that way. It's the cycle I used to use for my Isochrysis galbana 'Tahitian Gold', Tetraselmis suecica, Nannochloropsis oculata, Rhodomonas lens, and Thalassiosira weisfloggi cultures a few years ago when I grew phyto to sell.
I'm no pro so someone else with more experience may suggest something different, but I think I would set up some new cultures before you leave, save some in the fridge so you can restart if needed and possibly dilute the new cultures more than usual to allow more growing time. I've found they reach a certain density then stay there for a while.
I agree, put a liter of phyto in the fridge next split. You may be able to get away with 2 weeks but having a backup in the fridge is the way to go.
I use auto water changes and dose 3 liters a day. Imho most dose too little phyto to have much impact.
