Culturing Copepods - Dosing Diatoms?

[trevorhiller]

At around 21-22 mins in, he mentions dosing diatoms to copepod culture to prevent the culture from dying off.

I’ve never heard of this before in any of the instructions online for DIY copepod cultures.

Are those of you w/pod cultures doing this or not doing this?

 

[Fish Think Pink]

At around 21-22 mins in, he mentions dosing diatoms to copepod culture to prevent the culture from dying off.

I’ve never heard of this before in any of the instructions online for DIY copepod cultures.

Are those of you w/pod cultures doing this or not doing this?

I'm just one opinion and there are many ways to culture pods as well as many types of pods (my favorites are tiggers, due to size, hardness, more). Here is my thread:

raising tig pods - tiny 2.5g tank experimental culture #2

2nd attempt at raising tig pods is officially underway. Original attempt was outdoor lazy banana leaf method I found online - that is still underway but seems to be failing. Suspect Texas temperature and full day direct sunshine is too much, but that pod culture experiment still underway. 2nd...

forum.dfwmas.org

which is based on:

More pods.

My outside pod culture has exploded. I have millions of pods following on from last year. I will have live pods to feed until late summer at least now. So easy to culture nothing could be easier. All that's needed is a container, I use one of those under bed storage boxes, old tank water,a leaf...

www.reef2reef.com

as well as based on Chad of @Reef Nutrition training (which FaceBook will not let me link here) - REEF NUTRITION IS AWESOME!! Highly recommend any time you can learn from them first hand, go!

 

[GarrettT]

Depends, which type of pod? I promote diatoms in my main system by dosing silicate. You will see an increase in pods. That said, I wouldn’t consider it in a system that I am separately culturing.

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

Diatoms are a single cell algae , they eat any single cell algae, including phytoplankton which is easier to purchase than diatoms. Where to buy diatoms ? I never heard of buying diatoms but you can buy phytoplankton anywhere.

 

[trevorhiller]

I'm just one opinion and there are many ways to culture pods as well as many types of pods (my favorites are tiggers, due to size, hardness, more). Here is my thread:

raising tig pods - tiny 2.5g tank experimental culture #2

2nd attempt at raising tig pods is officially underway. Original attempt was outdoor lazy banana leaf method I found online - that is still underway but seems to be failing. Suspect Texas temperature and full day direct sunshine is too much, but that pod culture experiment still underway. 2nd...

forum.dfwmas.org

which is based on:

More pods.

My outside pod culture has exploded. I have millions of pods following on from last year. I will have live pods to feed until late summer at least now. So easy to culture nothing could be easier. All that's needed is a container, I use one of those under bed storage boxes, old tank water,a leaf...

www.reef2reef.com

as well as based on Chad of @Reef Nutrition training (which FaceBook will not let me link here) - REEF NUTRITION IS AWESOME!! Highly recommend any time you can learn from them first hand, go!

Tig pods are what I’m trying to culture too. I’ve tried it a couple times and my culture hasn’t ever really taken off until recently despite following the reef nutrition and algae barn info I’ve found on the forums. I honestly sort of gave up and left it running out of pure laziness then did a water change the other day and replenished the phyto because I noticed there were actually still pods swimming around in the bucket. They had sat for several weeks without feeding or any maintenance and all the sudden the population exploded after doing the maintenance. I posted some videos of it on my Instagram for anyone curious. I was quite happy the results so I’m going to give it some more time and see if I can keep the population growing since I’m finally seeing results. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CiJ0VOLjgja/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

Depends, which type of pod? I promote diatoms in my main system by dosing silicate. You will see an increase in pods. That said, I wouldn’t consider it in a system that I am separately culturing.

Personally I’m culturing tig pods, but honestly any… I’ve never heard of anyone culturing diatoms to feed to their pod cultures no matter what species they are trying for.

I am curious about your silicate dosing. Can you describe your process? Is it simply to keep a lot of copepods? Do you see any adverse effects from dosing silicates like diatoms or excessive sponges?

Diatoms are a single cell algae , they eat any single cell algae, including phytoplankton which is easier to purchase than diatoms. Where to buy diatoms ? I never heard of buying diatoms but you can buy phytoplankton anywhere.

Me neither and I’ve never heard of anyone culturing diatoms to feed to their pod cultures but I know a lot of people struggle with culturing pods and them not taking off. Obviously algae barn and reef nutrition have a solid process established and I believe that he mentioned that the diatom feeding is something algaebarn does. In the talk he makes it sound like diatom dosing is some sort of “secret sauce” to keep the cultures productive.

 

[reef_1]

I never added diatoms, when I was culturing.

I however beleive it could be benefical for pods - mine were run on green water and on other stuff with no issues.

To prevent crash best method I found was to remove 80 percent of culture replace it with fresh green water every 2 weeks - this way it never crashed.

I could not prevent crashing with other methods (though I havent tried many).