Culturing Amphipods and Copepods Together

[sbash]

Hi Everybody!

A couple weeks ago, I ordered some "benthics copepods of the order Cyclopoida and Harpacticoida", filled a bucket, added a bubbler and left it on the floor (it's actually in the way now, lol). I feed the bucket phyto daily.

I just randomly took a scoop out (about 250ml) to see what was floating around in the water column. There are various sizes of pods in there (moving), so I assume my culture is doing well. I'm culturing this for my own use as well as some cash on the side.

Is there any value in culturing other pods, like Amphipods. Or whatever else I can catch from my sump (I have oodles of mysid, perhaps I can culture them too?). I am going to split my copepod culture shortly, should I put them into the same culture containers or just fire up a few more buckets? Space might become an issue at some point...

Any thoughts out there? From experience or speculation welcome!

 

[ichthyogeek]

There's certainly value in what you culture! The question is, do the benefits outweigh the costs? As examples, there's multiple amphipod and mysis culture tutorials (I like this one by Frank Marini) .

Folks with syngnathids/picky eater fish would probably pay for live mysis. And people with dragonets/leopard wrasses/podivore fish would probably pay for amphipod/copepods.

It might be feasible to culture them based off of demand in Ottawa (I don't know what the saltwater scene is like there), but I'd be hesitant to ship them, since there's always people doing it, and shipping costs raise prices, which result in less buyers.

As for cross-culture, I wouldn't recommend doing it with mysis. They're hungry little buggers.

 

[taricha]

amphipods are pretty opportunistic. They'll likely eat a whole bunch of copepods.

 

[TFD Live Reef Foods]

amphipods are pretty opportunistic. They'll likely eat a whole bunch of copepods.

I second this. If you do plan on culturing amphipods i would do them seperate from the copepods. They will likely end up eating a lot of the copepods.

 

[sbash]

Great, thanks guys! I have lots of buckets, so it's all good until I run out of floor space

There's certainly value in what you culture! The question is, do the benefits outweigh the costs? As examples, there's multiple amphipod and mysis culture tutorials (I like this one by Frank Marini) .

Folks with syngnathids/picky eater fish would probably pay for live mysis. And people with dragonets/leopard wrasses/podivore fish would probably pay for amphipod/copepods.

It might be feasible to culture them based off of demand in Ottawa (I don't know what the saltwater scene is like there), but I'd be hesitant to ship them, since there's always people doing it, and shipping costs raise prices, which result in less buyers.

As for cross-culture, I wouldn't recommend doing it with mysis. They're hungry little buggers.

I'm just doing this for fun mainly, so the benefits definitely outweigh the costs. Besides, the costs are low and I am not interested in shipping. I just bought the bottle of pods because I needed to get the order up to the "free" shipping amount.

So, what I'll do is grab a bucket for mysid, amphipods and isopods and see what happens. I'll try to siphon each individually out of my sump. I won't bother buying any of these, as they are easy to suck up into a turkey baster.

Thanks again!