A copepod culture manual

Andy's culture procedures, Apocyclops panamensis:

Starting a culture.

• Place a starter culture into two culture vessels (about half in each).
• Double the water volume with new, clean saltwater. I would drip acclimate to your water conditions but they really are very hardy.
• If using O. marina as a food source, add about 1/5 of the current water volume of your copepod culture of O. marina to the copepod culture vessel.
• Aerate.
• Add ammonia control (ClorAmX) twice per day.

Every day until the culture container is full.

• Watch your culture. Dip a small jar into the culture and shine an LED flashlight through the back.
  • Do you see brooding females? You should see a lot of them.
  • Do you see really cloudy water that isn't the copepod food? That could be a bacteria bloom. If you are worried, pass the copepod culture through a 54 micron screen (keep the screen under water as much as possible) and then wash the screen into a new culture container with the same volume of clean water.
• Add a little clean saltwater to increase the culture volume. (I don't add a lot here. The goal is to fill your culture container over the course of 4-5 days.)
• Add about 1/5 of the culture volume of O. marina.
• Add ammonia control (ClorAmX) twice per day.

If your culture container is now full of water but the copepod volume still seems sparse, dip a ~50 micron sieve in the culture container and siphon off half the water volume from inside the sieve. Keep going with slowly adding volume.

So, now you have an established culture. What do you do now?

Every day.

• Watch your culture. Dip a small jar into the culture and shine an LED flashlight through the back.
  • Do you see brooding females? You should see a lot of them. That's really important. It's how you judge culture health, so look at them every day.
• Siphon off about 1/5 of the culture volume into a ~50 micron sieve. Wash those copepods into a larval fish tank.
• Replace the water volume with whatever you are using for food.Add ammonia control (ClorAmX) twice per day.

Periodic maintenance.

• When you start to notice the number of brooding females starting to drop, siphon the entire culture into a ~50 micron sieve, trying to avoid the gunk at the bottom.
• Wash the copepods into a new copepod container.
• I try to then ramp up the culture for two or three days again like I did when I first started the culture. This is just to give the culture some time away from constant harvest and lets the population rebound a bit.

 
Here is what a brooding female looks like:
 

 
Note: This is Jim Welsh's photo. He's been kind enough to let us use them in the class. Jim owns the copyright, though. Thanks, Jim!
 
That's it. They really are very easy, a lot like rots.

Next up will be one of these for O. marina.

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