Welcome to the last enrollees!

We have two newbies today and that fills our roster up completely. Thank you all for joining!
 
We have some possible good news coming. I'll let you know when I'm sure about things.
 
I'm really getting excited by the potential of this ... class? ... whatever you want to call it.

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

I'm pumped up about 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

sweet deal!
 
Andy, I would urge you to not count me against the Roster as I am more here to answer questions...

Pelagically yours,
~J      

Who has the spit wads?

It's such a privilege to be a newbie!  Thanks so much for including me.  I've gone copepod crazy lately, and it's nice to be able to post and ask questions of all you cope-gurus. I've acquired 7 different starters, with mixed results:
T californicus and rotifers, of course -- no problem.
O. marina-- not sure
Panamanensis -- did well for a while, now not so sure
Parvocalanus -- got some at the MBI conference, but it didn't look good from the git go.
Diapta something -- also not great.  I think I got 2 pods out the bottle.
Tisbe -- small but living
M Salina -- Winner winner chicken dinner.  Tons o pods.
 
I feel that I 'm not feeding correctly, or doing the right kind of water changes, or something.

Ditto

Kathy, when I had my Tisbe culture going, they really thrived when I would give them a little skimmate.  They love the stuff.

Did Chris and Barb get in? They were asking me about it last night.

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

Joe and Jim: I honestly didn't count you guys (since I don't have to send you all starters). I set the cutoff at 15 and we're at 17 now. No worries.
 
Kathy: I had replied to your PM but we should talk here, too. Let's start with the O. marina: What are you feeding them? They like oily food. Nanno is not going to cut it. They are more likely to do well on the enrichment feeds that you give rots than on what you are feeding the rots.
 
Otherwise, how are your running your cultures?
 
M. salina did fantastically for me for 6 weeks then dwindled to nothing over about 5 days, so I could use some direction there, too.

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

Tal: List is here. It doesn't look like it. They can follow along and read what we are up to and we can start a new one once this one is done. Heck, if they have questions, I'm sure we'll all try to help them in the forums.

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

where do we get the o marina?
 

On your front porch as soon as I send you some.
 
I don't think there's a commercial supplier out there other than the U. Texas Phyto Labs. Mine just showed up in my rot buckets, but there's supposed to be a professor here in town that study them.

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

sooo much to post here he he....
 
First off... Jim!!!  Thank god!!  if anyone has better insight into the little guys around here it's Jim...   Guy's (and gals) take note... Jim is one of the few of us purists left and he's got waaaaay more experience than I do!!
 
Kathy,
 
The cultures obtained at the workshop were under considerable stress, they showed up a little early and of course we drug them around, do not by any means count a failure on those cultures as yours!!  Most of these organisms cana; survive a 48-72 hour starvation period without considerable damage however they do get stressed, this is the battle we plankton geeks face!!
 
focus on the panamenensis!!!  it's fun!!  but before I can actually give you a species focus I actually need to know what you are trying to observe!!  remember the chat about how we throw things willy nilly at larvae?  It's not too hard to find the real answer, we merely have to look at the source of the problem.  If the problem originates in the tonga region, throwing a temparate species from the pacific coast isnt going to play....  we need to use our brains a bit here and do some research to play match maker

Pelagically yours,
~J      

 
I'll only let this stand if it is qualified to address Apocyclops panamensis specifically.  I will NOT accept this as an accurate statement of our relative experience with various zooplankters, in general!

Based upon your previous description of a milky white appearance and that you started yours as a contaminate to your rotifer cultures I wonder if I had some in a bucket of my rots too.    I had a bucket that I was maintaining with no aeration and after a couple weeks I began to notice streaks of white stuff in the culture.  I would continue to feed the bucket and in a few days it would be gone.  I figured it was a bacterial bloom of some sort from not being aerated.  Also interesting was that it occurred in the middle area of the buckets, whereas the rotifers congregated mostly along the edges.   It happened a few times over a month or so.  I may have to try replicate this, but that bucket has long been shutdown now. 

Milky white? It wasn't me that made that description. That sounds like bacteria to me.
 
Try this: Get an LED flashlight and shine it back at yourself through the back of your rotifer culture. You can see all the rotifers. They are big white dots, swirling around. O. marina look just like that, except way, way smaller and way, way more of them. In a good O. marina culture there will be clouds of them--and they swirl like clouds, too--but the clouds eventually resolve themselves so you can see individuals (even to me, with my bifocals). Bacteria, on the other hand, just looks like uniform cloudy water. You never see swirls of motion and it never resolves to individuals (since bacteria are much, much smaller).

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

I have been reading a ton of pod and culture stuff this week, I didn't mean to list you as providing that description. I read it somewhere but who knows where that was!

I am now back to my original thought that it was just bacteria. I didn't see any movement and it definitely didn't break apart or separate in any way. Thanks for the reply, I had thought I got lucky!

 
I would need a starter culture of it as well.  Can I just feed nano and tet to them?  My Iso is green, and I'm going to order another dish from florida aqua farm and try to start it again.

I've heard from others, and it has been my experience, that Iso cannot be grown from a FAF dish.  Nanno yes, Iso no.

^That's my experience as well. I assume that you could feed them nanno and tet. I just don't know if they'll thrive into dense cultures on it.
 
As we get closer to shipping, I'll start a thread for people to post in who want starters. I think I've lined up some good, cheap culture shipping containers and they are on the way to me.

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

Its not that Io cannot be grown from a FAF dish, it's that Iso is *incredibly* difficult to grow from a FAF dish!!  The algae simply loses upper hand to pretty much everything when stressed and gets outcompeted rather quickly.  I've managed on a few occassions but it's a very slow ramp up process.  Nanno and Tet you can easily scrape out into a 16 ounce bottle or 1000ml erlinmyer and split up to larger containers within a pretty quick pace...  Iso I have to scrape into 50ml tubes and babysit over a long period.  Usually takes about a month to ramp Iso from disc to 1000ml cultures (maintaining multiples of course!)
 
Carolina biological supply ships liquid cultures of Iso for around $8 a culture and it's been my preferred source for Iso when I feel the need to fight with this painful species...  most times I'm usin reeds Iso1800 line

Pelagically yours,
~J      

Would using paste and slightly bubbling it so it stays in suspension work for stuff that feeds on Iso?  I'd rather go all paste/dry is possible, less crap to worry about!

generally it does Brett, though I must stress to everyone that Iso is not the magic bullet...  Variety is the key!
 
Regardless of whether your going paste or live, try and use multiple species as it will help round out the nutrition and offer a variety of cell sizes / shapes for the target to choose from.   My favorite mixes typically contain live Rhodomonas, live Nanno, live Gymnodinium, and Iso 1800 paste.  Think of the Gymnodinium as an O. marina substitute, it's another dinoflagellate that is easily obtained and tends to do extremely well in culture (then again it's also the evil red tide lol).
 
The big key though is in the variety!!  One of the main reasons why products like FAF's roti rich and the new line of products from Reed do so well is that they are not unicultured.

Pelagically yours,
~J      

I was thinking of Iso paste and then throwing in the live greenwater (no idea of species) that I can make from the fresh saltwater here.  I figure I'll be hitting enough nutrients that way for 'pods. (well hoping!

 
The interesting thing is that I followed their instruction and used the entire dish to start a culture with just 500ml of salt water.  And then I saw the dish still had a tiny little bit of brown stuff of it, so I scraped it real clean and pour in the tiny bit of scraped stuff on to a second 2L bottle and completely filled with 2L of 1.018 water.
 
The 500ml one that followed their instruction stayed clean for over a week then turned green.  While the 2L bottle with the tiny bit of Iso turned chocolate gradually during the week.  By 2nd week, the chocolate color got quite dark so I splited it.  Then all hell broke loose.  Everything turned green in just a week.
 
 
 
I already have nano and tet going pretty well.  just want to add iso into the mix to give it enough variety.
 
 
I'll be on the complete opposite of the spectrum.  Since my wife really doesn't want me to order any more "stuff", I have to grow everything my own.  Once I have a culture going, hopefully salt is the only thing that I'll have to order.
 

 
yup, as Gresham says anything with crisis in the name is bound to be interesting..  this is typical behavior as the cells stress easily.  I learned long ago to split based on timing regardless of culture color and density (recommendation by Hoff) and it has proven to be a good method for me.  You may try again but focus on splits at 8-10 days regardless of color or density.  Starting small and staying small until confident of the cultures density is always a good bet.  There is nothing wrong with splitting into smaller cultures providing you have space.  Algae are just as alive as any other organism, dont think of it as splitting your cultures... think along the lines of providing a more comfortable environment for 20 million pets.

Cant wait to see this one!!  Most people, even the advanced hobbyists have thrown out culturing due to the time and efforts involved and have thus gone the routes of the prepared feeds.  I cannot knock the prepared feeds especially lately as the last two years has brought incredible innovation to the market.  Then again I culture live algae because I *love* algae!!  It will be interesting to see what your thoughts are when you begin to delve into different species, especially the dino's and the Oxyrhiis as they are prolific and voracious to boot.
 
Necessity may be the mother of invention but observation is the mother of creativity!  Just wait till you see what's upstream!

Pelagically yours,
~J      

Ditto that.  I've grown Nanno and Tetraselmis from FAF disks, but I've NEVER grown ISO from an FAF disk.  My preferred source is SeahorseSource.com (via Algagen) for ISO starters.

For some reason I'm unable to find the list of participants...

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

Maybe from the forum's group member list?
 

Thanks, I'm a bit slow sometimes.

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

 
Don't forget you'll need an F/2 to fuel the algal growth, I doubt you'll find that locally and Miracle Grow is no substitute despite what people say.
 
 

 
But this is Oxyrrhis marina, a hetertrophic dinoflagellate.  It is not, as far as I am aware, photosynthetic.  Neither Andy nor I have been using F/2 to grow this organism.  CCMP lists seawater + CCMP1320 (Dunaliella tertiolecta) as a food  Am I missing something here?

 
Yes you are missing something as there is source for oxy paste is there?  Read up above my post, you will see they were talking about growing ISO, pastes, etc
 

OK, Gresham.  My bad.  Wesley was talking about live phyto as a feed, instead of paste.  I did miss something!  Thanks for the clarification.  You are right, he will need F/2, if he wants to use live phyto to feed things.

+1  And yes I am bitter about the Miracle Grow.... lol
 
There are also other popular sources out there that recommend pre-mixing up batches of culture medium (saltwater and the F/2) so that you have it ready in a pinch.  This is also a bad idea as culture medium standing unused becomes a very nice target for contaminates, always best to mix up medium at the time of split keeps things cleaner!

Pelagically yours,
~J      

I just ordered 1kg of dry form of MICRO ALGAE GROW MASS PACK™ from FAF and it should be good for 10,000L in f/2 level.  Should last me awhile.  
 

LOL... you'd think.....
 
and then you become a card carrying member of AA... Algae Anonymous...  the cultures start to change... different species... different levels... more risks... more splits...
 
Next thing you know your on the phone begging and pleading for another mass pack....  maybe two.......
 
*sigh*

Pelagically yours,
~J      

LOL!!  Sounds like from an AA member himself.  
 

I was able to squeeze in here as someone was too busy so thanks to those who helped me get in and I'll be doing a lot of reading and catching up so Im sorry if I am quiet. If I have questions I'll ask, thats for sure. (Sorry Tal   .... as you are the closest to me you might get the blunt end of those questions... as usual.)

-Adam

LOL. Welcome to 'pod land.

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