Supplies you need to culture O. marina

lol sadly though Kathy labeled it as dry reading....
 
pshaw

Pelagically yours,
~J      

I think temps have cooled down enough we should be able to ship.  I would love to get this going as I think it will be very helpful in working with my PJs which seem to have gotten back into spawning mode.
 
What ya think fish?

Has anyone tried this method for feed?
 
found this in a manual I downloaded.
After doing some research, I found an alternative that actually produces better results than some of the micro algae we use for growing pods. I'm sure this would work for rotifers also, still have some checking to do on that end.

It's called "Modified Moe's Media (MMM)

1. Tomato or Vegetable juice (V-8, Campbells Coup Co., 240 ml)
2. enriched brewer's yeast (GNC Brand, 10 grams)
3. liquid vitamin C (GNC Brand, 1 ml)
4. liquid vitamin B complex (GNC Brand, 2 ml), and
5. flax seed oil (GNC Brand, 5 ml)

To feed the copepods, these ingredients were combined and blended for two minutes (Osterizer, blend setting). Artificial sea water (30 ppt) was added until the total volume of the mixture was one litre. This larger volume of feed was blended for two more minutes.

The particle sizes were equel to the diameter of live Tetraselmis (10 to 12 um).
Feeding one mL L-1 MMM provided approximately 50,000 liposomes ml -1 with diameters in the range of 10 to 12 um.
 
 

RLTW

180 Gallon Mixed Reef

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!" Isaiah 6:8

Yeah, Adelaide Rhodes did, to feed Nitokra lacustris:  http://www.fishlarvae.com/e/BigBang/Rhodes.pdf

is it an option for this study?

RLTW

180 Gallon Mixed Reef

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!" Isaiah 6:8

You can do whatever you'd like. The more methods we have available the better. The main goal of this class is to get more people culturing pelagic copepods, to put some pods into their hands for them to get some practice, and to give people a friendly place to ask questions.
 
I don't really have a "method" and, truth be told, I rarely trust "methods" when they don't make sense to me (especially if someone puts a little TM next to the name), so I certainly don't mind whatever you do. I'm _sure_ interested in the results you come up with.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

sweet. I'm going to try to pick up the supplies this weekend to feed them. Lovin It!!!!

RLTW

180 Gallon Mixed Reef

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!" Isaiah 6:8

I've done a lot of yeast variants as well as boiled wheat and some other oddball ideas (potato peels, ground roots, etc.)
 
The issues there is when it comes to water quality, though it's much the same as using a prepared algal feed verses live.  One of the main reasons I prefer to use live microalgae in my cultures is that the cells provide nutrient export and foul the water less.

Pelagically yours,
~J      

so doing a small water change every few days would be a good idea. I'm going to try the MMM method. I've got a couple of papers to read on it so that I'm more comfortable with it, but it takes next to nothing each day to feed.

RLTW

180 Gallon Mixed Reef

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!" Isaiah 6:8

Every day. Do water changes every day. Twice a day if you need to. Remember, these guys reproduce really quickly. They just plain fill up the container. But they live fast and die fast. Culture water gets nasty if you leave them be.
 
All that said, I _do_ occasionally have a day where there's just no time to run the siphons and I skip a day. But then I double-dose the Clor-Am-X. Even so, sometimes a culture will head south after I do this. (I just gave up on one today after having skipped a water change earlier this week. It just didn't look or smell right so I dumped it.)

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

I am confused about whether the MMM is being discussed as a feed for the Oxyrrhis or for the Apocyclops.  Can you please clarify your thoughts, rgrking?

I was thinking of using the MMM for the Apocyclops. I'm worried about the O marina. The only reason is because T iso is so hard to culture and the RG+ is a bit on the expensive part. I haven't found any small bottles of it that are within the $20 range.  I just want this to work, that's why I'm bringing it up now.

RLTW

180 Gallon Mixed Reef

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!" Isaiah 6:8

But if you buy the $70 amount, you can split it up into a dozen small bottles or small ziplock bags or whatever.  Throw them in the freezer and use one at a time.  Very economical.
 

+1 it can be frozen for 2yrs.

http://www.fishtalpropagations.com/#!home/mainPage
"Making captive breeding easier."

I have a bunch of tiny tupperware that handle the freezer really well.

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

ok I wasn't sure on how much you get when you buy it, but I know it's a concentrated product. I'll have to check it out.

RLTW

180 Gallon Mixed Reef

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!" Isaiah 6:8

I'm going to try the MMM thing too but at my local GNC they didnt have liquid vitamin C but vitamin C crystals that you add into water. but downside is that it has rose hips in with it. I actually have tons of these copepods in my fish system running rampet all over so I'm not worried if my culture crashes with the rose hips.

What do you mean by "these copepods"?  You have tons of Apocyclops panamensis in your fish system?  Or are they Nitokra lacustris?
 

Sorry, Yes the Apocyclops panamensis. I didn't look at them under the scope but they look identical with my naked eye to the Apocyclops panamensis that the class is working with. I'll check with the scope tonight after work.

Refreezing RG+ is one of the reasons we came up with RGcomplete.  By refreezing you do not get the 2+ shelf life listed on our website, that is the shelf life if remained frozen from the initial freeze.  Refreezing can lead to a less efficient although but it seems to be working just for you guys   Our commercial hatcheries are far more demanding as far as efficiency of feeds goes, but they are working with much denser and much larger systems then you.  They'll blow through a liter in a couple days.

Do you ever check the DO of these cultures?  You may want to give that a whirl when you double dose ClorAm-X.  I seem to remember something about it pulling DO down in higher doses.

I don't have a DO meter but it's a good idea. What I see is not necessarily a crash in the O. marina population but a large bloom in the bacterial population, which I regard as a crashed culture, too, since it can cause bacterial blooms in the copepods and is just a huge pain all the way around. In fact, I just re-started another O. marina today because of a bacterial bloom that looks to have transferred to two of my copepod cultures (sigh).
 
Good news is that the alga contaminant in one of my O. marina cultures seems to have died off completely, leaving a very clean O. marina culture. I'm currently splitting that culture through the rest of my buckets (and throwing away the fouled cultures) so I may be rid of the foulness. Maybe even this week!

--Andy, the bucket man.
"Not to know the mandolin is to argue oneself unknown...." --Clara Lanza, 1886

Looks like I messed my cultures up.  Both cultures have become cloudy with what I believe to be bacterial blooms.  If I had another backup, I could just start over from that one, but it got both in the same day.
 
Is there any method I could use to try to sieve out the O marina from the bacteria?  Or possibly a method to starve out the bacteria?  I'd like to try that before asking for another starter culture.

- David Gibson
Denton, TX