Breeding Journal, Species: Synchiropus sp. "Ruby Red"

The later(lots of P. crassirostris). Particularly since I didn't do the former (copepod salad) this time around.  There may be some ciliates in there, but all I'm intentionally feeding them is parvo and live phytoplankton.

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Days 9 and 10, still going well though perhaps some die off.  I have to remove adult parvo from the larval jar and add back nauplii, although I am at 12 naups/eggs per ml now.  From a 6 liter jar, I am changing 2 liters a day. Soon they should be eating copepodites, right?

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9-10 days - keep up the great work Kathy!

Now days 12 and 13.  Some die off, way too many parvo nauplii (50 / ml).  I can't say they are growing, but I look at them constantly, so growth is hard to judge.
 
Parvo are not rotifers. They don't just multiply, they spawn eggs and nauplii that grow in a day and aren't nauplii any more, so if the larvae eat only nauplii, they are going to need more new ones each day.
 
I now have the happy problem of too many parvo.  I started this run not having enough.
I should give a MBI workshop talk on Parvo. It would bore everyone to tears.

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Anxious to see a current pic, but I do understand if you don't want to traumatize them with a photo session. How many larvae do you estimate are still alive? And 50 naups per ml sounds awesome - they should not be lacking for food! Does your pretzel jar have any airline or other circulation

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ken

Kathy I'm pretty sure a talk dedicated to high density Parvo culture wouldn't bore any of us to tears lol

I'm pretty sure it would.  It involves a lot of math and biology: things normal people avoid learning.
 
Clearly, despite near constant surveillance, I've bungled the thing.  Major die off today, day 12 and 13. This evening I am doing a 70% water change to remove the amazing bloom of parvo. and leave a more reasonable concentration of food for them. I hope it doesn't kill them all. We are almost at 2 weeks. No measurable ammonia, but these guys may be hyper sensitive, and from the papers I've been reading, parvo hatching into nauplii seems to generate ammonia more so than the adult copepods do by themselves.  I don't think we can stand much more in the way of losses, or we will be down to zero larvae.

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Looks like maybe 10.  Started with a couple hundred, estimated.
 
They are certainly not lacking for food, and I'm happy that I can culture parvo to get that kind of number,  but how would you feel if you were being pelted by 10 times as many donuts as you could possibly eat, constantly? Too much food is likely to be a bad thing too.

Yes, it has a rigid open airline with just enough air to make a vertical circulation, like a kreisel effect.
 
As much as I am tickled to have gotten them to almost 2 weeks in a pretzel jar, if I have the opportunity to do this again, I'll probably use a BRT.  I would like to try the pretzel jar with damsels again, though I don't think any survived this time around.  I like that I can see what's going on.  In a BRT, so often, you add larvae or eggs, and hope. Seeing them is not easily accomplished.
 

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day 13 and 14 and only 4 or 5 left, and they are not looking too good.  20 nauplii per ml.

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Did another massive water change and got them down to 8 nauplii per ml.  Remaining few larvae are actively hunting instead of drifting around their watery ferris wheel. Not holding up too much hope, though.

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This was day 11 or 12:

 
Day 14 or 15, almost killed this one, member of the last 3 or so larvae.

 

 

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they don't look a lot different.

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Can't find any this evening.Day 14 and 15. Disappointment moderated by first spawn of G. okinawae pair!

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What if you tried adding a second food?  I remember Witt telling me that Pseudodiamptomus was useful for Synchiropus culture.

Not a bad suggestion.  I really think they were killed by the pelting donuts of Parvo overpopulation.  Working on it….

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Spoke too soon.  Last night I did find one surviving on neglect. I fed some phyto, and keep the heat, air and lights on, but I stopped trying to control copepod population otherwise. I don't expect much, but raising one is not a bad thing.

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These are getting 24hr lighting?

yes.

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What do you think about maybe 4-6 hours of darkness a night? My understanding has always been that 24hr lighting keeps the larvae eating all the time, with the idea of increased intake thereby making up for possibly underwhelming nutritional density. With the prey available to your larvae, maybe periods of rest could help?

To run with Matt's comment regarding a second prey item, Isochrysis is tauted as the holy grail of algae and the same for Parvo, but we forget that Iso isn't necessarily nutritionally balanced, and its all we feed parvo. Perhaps the high DHA content and relatively low EPA is holding development back during a crucial time. Days 12-15 should be a time of high growth and development if these model other scooters, settling at days 18-21. Maybe bringing in a second copepod, fed a different algae, is the answer.

You can add a diatom to the diet, like Thalassiosira pseudonana or T. weissflogii, and achieve higher EPA levels when fed to the Parvos.  T.p. or T.w. have ample EPA content of roughly 20% of fatty acids.  In addition to Iso, I always feed my Parvos, and other pods, a diatom to achieve a more balanced diet.   I'm a huge fan of offering a binary, or trinary, diet for any live feed organism I'm working with.
 
Chad 

All good ideas.  My parvo cultures and "green water" is a mix of Isochrysis and Rhodomonas.  Not green at all. I'll have to find out what's a diatom.
 
The only other copepod I have on hand is Apocyclops panamensis. I think its too fast for these guys.  Perhaps rotifers will work, but I am at a low point in rotifers, having just restarted my cultures, thinking I had nothing to feed. And its Friday night, so nothing ordered will come until Tuesday. 
 
It does make sense that they should be eating something bigger, now that the larva is at day 16 or 17.  On the other hand, it's drowning in copepodites and adult Parvo, so if it just needs something bigger, bigger is readily available.

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I doubt you have an issue of prey size as much as availability of different fat profiles. Chad probably has more raw knowledge on the topic than I do since most of my knowledge came from the work done at Reed but his idea of TW or another algae should theoretically solve this (assuming parvo eats it).

I know TW is available in paste form. Chad, have you experimented yet with different algae pastes in your research with A panamensis? Maybe by this point these guys can take down those slightly larger nauplii which are potentially fed a more balanced (or compensated) paste diet?

I'm hoping to use A panamensis (maybe even Euterpina) to raise mandarins in the near future. I know these larvae are smaller than the mandarin complex larvae, but my hopes are to succeed by manipulating the pastes I use to meet the needs of the larvae through the single species A panamensis diet.

good luck. Parvo doesn't do well on pastes, and they grow so easily on live phyto, that that is the way I have chosen to go.
 
I don't know how important diet to the Parvocalanus is, in terms of its nutritive value to fish larvae. Remember that copepods are intrinsically more nutritious than rotifers.  They are a more complex organism, and they can synthesize things that rotifers cannot.  Rotifers have been described as packages for phytoplankton, only as good to the larvae as their last phytoplankton meal.  Copepods are not bags of phytoplankton.  In fact, the nauplii, that are so desirable as first food for tiny larvae, have not yet begun to feed.  Its a different critter all together, and our thinking about them has to be different from care, feeding, and use of rotifers, as well.
 
I understand from Chad that he has  great cultures of A. panamensis growing on pastes, and that is really wonderful.  So i think your hypothesis is interesting and testable, and I look forward to hearing how it goes.  Andy Rhyne has raised mandarins on Parvo and Isochrysis, using a benign neglect method (it happened while he was moving his lab). So I think even for mandarins, Parvo and Iso are sufficient.  Perhaps you will discover a better way.

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Andy raised mandarins on Acartia tonsa 'by accident' but he encouraged me in a brief conversation that parvo was a better choice because of ease of culture over A tonsa. On an only slightly unrelated topic, I still want to attempt to culture A tonsa on ciliates fed pastes to experiment with this theory but I can't find O marina to do it with. I'd like to challenge copepod cultures fed O marina against one another with only the diet of the O marina as the variables.

I didn't intend to use pastes with parvo at all, but instead A panamensis because from my research it is small enough for mandarins to take, but not scooters. I get that they're more than vessels of algae to our larvae but is there any hard research regarding to what extent copepods are actually able to convert fats from one form to another...and then pass them on to their offspring?

For example, would n1 parvo naups (never yet actually eaten anything) from a culture fed only Iso have the exact same nutrient profile as naups of the same stage from a culture of adults fed a more balanced set of live algaes? Is that information even available? I don't know.

All I'm saying is I find it hard to believe that an organism cultured on a single skewed feed such as Iso could present a totally balanced profile for another far more advanced organism, let alone one attempting to undergo dramatic transformation. A diet of only Isochrysis is enough to grow and reproduce for parvocalanus and acartia. Is that food chain sufficient for all larvae? I have to think not. Sorry for the long post, I had an espresso later than I should have

 
 
Doh! I think that is the second time I made that error….
 
 
 
If I ever see O marina pop up in my cultures, I'll send you some.  I used to have it, but stopped trying to culture it when I went back to live phyto.  Is O marina considered a ciliate? It's so much smaller, I just assumed it was a different critter.


 
 
That could really work, but Chad has A. panamensis growing on pastes already.  I don't know if he is using O. marina to get there. I think there are some threads about using O. marina to get algae paste nutrition to A. panamensis.  Either here or on MOFIB.
 
 
 
None that I know of.  I haven't looked. There was  a paper about O. marina, though, and its ability to convert fatty acids to something useful.  I'll see if I can find it, cause the details are fuzzy in my poor brain.


 
 
Neither do I, but it is also important to ask if any difference in copepod nutrient profile would be critical to the larvae, or not. It might be worthwhile to gather information from people who have succeeded compared to those who have failed, in raising something on A. panamensis or P. crassirostris, and what they fed the copepod brood stock.  See if there is a  corelation of what the adult copepods ate, with success or failure of their nauplii as prey items.  Find out if it matters.

 
 
I get what you are saying, and can only offer that P. crassirostris has been tried with other algaes as singe food sources, and it grows better with Isochrysis than the other phytos tested.  Chad Clayton once mentioned that cultures grow better with iso AND tetraselmis or chaeto co-fed, but the Iso part seems critical to the success of the critter.  
 
I don't know if adding another phyto to their diet would produce more nutritious nauplii, perhaps it would, but it could just as easily make no difference at all.  I could be that the critical nutrient that makes a copepod's nauplii successful prey items for some larvae is already supplied by the Isochrysis diet, and that the enhanced fecundity noticed by adding another phyto. is irrelevant to the larval diet.
That said, I see no harm in feeding a variety of good photos to the copepods. I do it with whatever I have growing, and at every chance I get.
 
Interesting discussion.  thanks.

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I think we pretty much agree here. Just as much as what I'm saying makes sense (at least to me LOL) it could easily be completely false or at least irrelevant. I'm just brainstorming. Who am I kidding, I barely have the space to raise the small batches of larvae and feeds I have now, let alone run experiments challenging different feeding protocols.

I remember reading myself about O marina's ability to convert acids like you mentioned. Acartia tonsa is well documented as being successfully cultured using O marina. I've also read several times that parvo doesn't do well cultured on O marina which sucks because its as good as the copepod eating paste in my eyes.

My inability to get my hands on O marina is the driving force behind my excitement to try raising mandarins on A panamensis. Imagine having this complex available commercially again at a price point more comparable to wild caught?! Paste fed copepods could bridge that gap.

EDIT EDIT EDIT! O marina is a dinoflagellate not ciliate. Sorry!

My experience raising A panamensis on either O. marina and paste, or live algae, is that live algae is more successful and easier. Culturing O. marina takes more attention than culturing live algae.   Culturing algae certainly costs less than buying paste, although that is not unreasonably priced. I always keep some on hand and use it for rotifers all the time.
 
I think the issue with ORA, if I recall correctly, is that it took so long to get the mandarins to market size, the real estate used during the post-meta growout period was what cost too much.  Not the larval rearing costs.
By all means, you can raise mandarins on A. panamensis and rotifers, and you should do it.  ORA couldn't make money on it, but if you market it right, I'll bet you can make it profitable.
 
 

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Real estate was another issue touched on when I talked with Jonathan over at FishEye. His experience was that mandarins took nearly a year to reach market size. Something I think about a lot with this project.

Well, what else are you going to do with a whole apartment? LOL.  Might as well use it for something...

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No sign of the last larvae all day, so I'm calling it: Day 17 or 18 is the longest I've kept one alive.

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Kathy, just remember, they could be settling out super tiny by day 17-18...so....don't throw the baby out with the bathwater...do a VERY thorough search first!

I always do. 
 
I don't think they were settling, as they had hardly grown, and grew more lethargic at the end.  I think they survived the first 18 days because they ate parvo nauplii, and got overwhelmed by too many parvo, and underfed by not having the pod they needed at the end. Just thoughts based on observation, and nothing more.

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I met with Tom today and he gave me some new eggs, lots of them.  They should be hatching now.  I have them in the jar again this time, live Iso, and air and clean water.  We shall see.

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Nice hatch. I added parvo nauplii even though they have no mouths yet, just so they have something to practice darting at.  
 
I've ordered a new batch of parvo (Reed Mariculture), so hopefully I will have enough nauplii to keep them alive past 16 days this time. 

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Yesterday, Tuesday Oct 13, they appeared to have eyes, but were still drifting, head down, only occasionally darting at copepods.
 
Today day 4, they started darting with more enthusiasm and tonight, they are mostly horizontal, pigmented eyes, opaque bodies, not transparent like before, and more active darting.

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I got a couple of them under the microscope and they have food in the guts; they look quite full.  Their bodies have a reddish hue and have dark spots in a pattern on the body.  The guts are greenish brown and bulging.

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Oh nice! time to set a new record =)

Thanks, but we are still at day 4. 12 more days to go for  new record.  Would be awesome to get to settlement, or even significant growth.

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Today is day 5 and they look good.  I continue to feed parvao nauplii.  The iso in the jar is still a good color so I haven't added any. Light 24/7 and temperature 77F.  I'm using a terrestrial transplant warming mat, setting the jars on that, and it workes well in summer, but now that it is cooler, I'm wondering if it wll be adequate in the winter.
 
 
The larvae continue to look plump and pigmented, though the last third of their bodies, including the tail, is transparent.  Holding a ruler up to the jar, I can see the pigmented part is about 2mm on average, so probably the length of the larvae is closer to 3 mm now.
 
They don't dart like gobies, rather they lunge short distances in between drifting with the slow current of the air lift in the jar.  This was a really good hatch.  Tom has two females that spawn with the male, so there were a lot of eggs, and this batch seems more robust than the previous one where I got to 16 days.

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