Hey! Not too bad. Thirty-six hours after thinking, "Hey, maybe I could mentor something..." we have ten people signed up for it and hopefully a few more to come. Welcome to you all. I hope I do a decent job for you.
We also have two "guest experts" (or "resident plankton geeks" or "people to keep me on my toes") in Joe and Jim. And let's be honest, either one of them could likely teach this better than I can. Heck, I got my first culture of
Apocyclops from Jim, after all, and he's been fantastic helping me out with my cultures. And, as Joe's said, he crashes more cultures in a year than I've ever tried. Okay, maybe Joe didn't actually say that but it doesn't mean it isn't true.
I've always believed in taking a skeptical approach toward teachers (and "experts" in general). When a teacher steps in front of a room, the first thing they should do is defend why the heck they should be there in the first place so the students know exactly where they stand. Why am I here? Well, I've had
Apocyclops in a continuous culture for maybe a year-and-a-half or two years (can you remember when you sent them to me, Jim?). That's pretty much my only qualification: I've managed to keep these guys alive. Please keep this in mind, too: I still have a lot to learn.
As far as the
O. marina goes, I first isolated them from a dead rotifer culture, probably ... five or six years ago. I first decided to try to specifically culture them about three years ago. And then I decided to try them out as a copepod food about a year later. I've later found out that I'm not the first to offer them as an exclusive copepod food source. Luis found a reference in a science journal of at least one scientist who used
O. marina as an sole food for copepods.
O. marina used to be used a lot mixed together with T. Iso in copepod feeds and, in fact, the dino was once thought necessary to raising pelagic copepods. Scientists found that
O. marina are really good at taking in good oils from the phyto they eat and concentrating them in their bodies, so they make really good copepod food. But then scientists also realized that
O. marina are not actually necessary to keep their copepods alive, that T-Iso is enough all by itself. So the use of
O. marina went out of favor, because
O. marina was considered particularly difficult to culture (more so than T-Iso, which is saying something).
I didn't know any of that when I started trying this dino with copepods. Heck, I didn't even have an ID for it back then. Jim had to tell me what it was at least a year into me culturing the little guys.
So, I guess all of that was a long-winded way of telling you where I stand. I'm just like you will be after you've had a couple of years to work with these. I still have a lot to learn and I hope I learn a lot in the next few months with you all.