Free floating zooplankton

[Nick Rose]

I'm going to be culturing phytoplankton to increase my zooplankton in our backup/emergency tank in the garage. I know I have a lot of zooplankton on the glass, tank floor, rocks. But I was wondering if a reef tank has free floating zooplankton that corals can grab like they can in the ocean. The tank is 40 gallons with a sump that currently has 15 gallons but can go to 20 gallons. There is no socks, I have a Aquac EV 180 skimmer that has been running for 2 weeks and have two large clumps of chaeto that I harvested from our 90 gallon main tank.

These are two of hundreds, thousands or zooplankton on the glass. They are the size of maybe a needle point or close to that.

 

[AlexG]

In my experience you will get free floating zooplankton in the tanks but because of filtration such as a skimmer and other predators such as fish and corals it will not be likely to reach populations that will live freely in the water column. However pods of all different kinds breed and in many cases those eggs or freshly hatched larva stages of pods will be free floating until they settle, are consumed, or removed via the skimmer. Another good source of larger zooplankton is to have some cleaner shrimp in the tank as their breeding activities will frequently release larvel stage cleaner shrimp into the water column which are a great food source for fish and corals. If you really want to see how much zooplankton is living in your tank get a stereo micoscope and start looking at sand and refugium algae samples. I know both my sand and refugium algae are almost crawling because of the abundance of life they hold that cannot be easily seen without a microscope.

 

[Nick Rose]

Right now I don’t have any fish but might add a few later on for some more nutrients in the system. It’s bare bottom and I leave the detritus for the zooplankton. Does it matter how the skimmer is run? Will more zooplankton be killed with wet skim vs dry or does both do the same?