Adding ocean plankton?

[monti mike]

Has anyone added ocean plankton? How did it turn out? I stumbled across this but who knows if any survives or has pests?

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[ichthyogeek]

No, but it looks like you're basically adding ocean water to your tank. So you might get some unknown pests in your tank if you add it. Are you necessarily trying to feed a specific organism? Or are you just looking into increasing your tank's diversity?

I've ordered from Sach's before. The mysis they sell are pretty cool, but they all died/disappeared into my rock work so I don't know if they actually ever thrived or not. I continue to have amphipods in my tanks years since the addition, so at least the amphipod infusion works. And I believe I may have also added in their copepod blend as well, and I've definitely still got pods in the tank as well.

The lab I was working at last year did an order of Daphnia + zooplankton food which worked out pretty well (I added a ramshorn snail to deal with larger food particles but it was still pretty good).

 

[monti mike]

No, but it looks like you're basically adding ocean water to your tank. So you might get some unknown pests in your tank if you add it. Are you necessarily trying to feed a specific organism? Or are you just looking into increasing your tank's diversity?

I've ordered from Sach's before. The mysis they sell are pretty cool, but they all died/disappeared into my rock work so I don't know if they actually ever thrived or not. I continue to have amphipods in my tanks years since the addition, so at least the amphipod infusion works. And I believe I may have also added in their copepod blend as well, and I've definitely still got pods in the tank as well.

The lab I was working at last year did an order of Daphnia + zooplankton food which worked out pretty well (I added a ramshorn snail to deal with larger food particles but it was still pretty good).

I was going down the YouTube rabbit hole and saw a swarm of mysid shrimp and thought.. oh! Maybe that would be awesome to add to the tank and they can live in the rocks and get eaten by the fish when the come out! So I found that site and then thought.. hmm maybe some interesting things would be in the plankton of it would just feed the corals. I started with dry rock (avoiding aiptasia in the current tank) so I’m always open to adding some diversity. I miss some of the unique life you get with real live rock. I don’t miss battling aiptasia though!

 

[monti mike]

Or is it opossum shrimp that survive in a normal reef tank? Can you buy them or just get them as hitchhikers? Going out to the google to see what I can find...

 

[sdreef]

I just added these to my refugium and tank this week. I ordered specifically the mysid shrimp from Sachs aquaculture. I've added amphipods and mutiple species of copepods from other vendors separately. This is my first time adding the mysids. From what I read, it looks like they may eat copepods, amphipods, and other mysids, but I was interested in the diversity. Will see how it goes.

 

[ichthyogeek]

You can certainly buy mysis/opossum shrimp, but they're just so tasty to the fish, I wouldn't be surprised if they all got eaten. Doesn't help that they're also cannibalistic...

Have you considered looking into products like garf grunge, or buying live rock and quarantining it for a very long while so you can manage any unwanted larger hitchhikers?