Culture Journal, Species: Moina salina

General
Species:  Moina salina
Species description:  Saltwater daphnia
Culture source (link if possible):  Algagen, Jim Welsh
If algae, CCMP # (Optional): 
http://ccmp.bigelow.edu/
Culture Establishment Date:  June 8, 2011
Continuation Date:  11/21/2011

Culturing Vessel Details
Salinity:  20 ppt
Temperature:   78F  
pH:  8

Vessel description:  Indoors: gallon jar .  Outdoors: 17 gallon black round tub outdoors on concrete patio, shaded from afternoon sun by a large sycamore tree.  Bird netting secured over top to keep out birds, squirrels and small children (drowning hazard).

Lighting description:  Indoors: fluorescent Grow light, 5500 K .  Outdoors: Natural sunlight, though mostly shaded
Lighting cycle:  Indoors: 14 day/ 10 night.  Outdoors: as varied as the seasons   
Aeration description:  Indoors:rapid, but not boiling, with open airline to bottom of jar, air pump. ,/ sometimes just a cap with a hole in it, and no pumped air
Outdoors: as the wind blows.

Methodologies
Split methodology: Indoor culture: When sediment accumulates, turn off air for an hour or so, and decant culture into clean jar. Sometimes filtered the daphnia to clear the medium, and backwashed into clean saltwater.
Outdoor culture: No care whatsoever.  
Culture medium description: 
Indoor: Algal food is 6 parts N-rich, 1 part Roti-Grow+, equal volume ChloramX. Fed this, about 12 drops, twice a day.   Also fed daily about 100 ml Oxyrrhis marina, fed with same algal food. Sometimes fed with RGcomplete.
Outdoor: Aged saltwater in 17 gallon black round tub outdoors on concrete patio, layer of detritus on bottom from pollen, insects, small leaves, etc. that fell thru the bird netting.  I noticed an occasional algal bloom. Once I dumped some wild algae in from my attempts at culturing. Otherwise no intentional feeding.
Cell count:
   not known.  Outdoor culture bloomed during the summer with M. salina--very dense. Lasted about 10 days.

Reference links:  

Additional Information
(No Pictures or Videos in the Section Please)
Notes: 



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Original culture from Jim Welsh. These did very well for me producing a pretty dense culture for 3 weeks to a month,  and then appeared to crash.  I had not done much about their water quality, little to no water changes, I don't remember, and didn't write anything down. I suspect their crash was due to water quality.
 
I was able to get a few survivors and restarted the culture. By a few, I mean I counted 4. In a week's time there were many more.  Either they are very prolific or I mis-counted the survivors.
The literature suggests that they drop their eggs, but are capable of parthenogenesis as well.  
 
My current practice is to feed them twice daily with 6pNR/1RG+, and once daily with a pudding cup's worth of my O. marina culture.  When the sediment accumulates and the water looks cloudy with detritus, I turn off the air for an hour or so to let the culture settle, and then decant the culture into a clean jar.
 One should not do this too frequently, however, as one will likely lose a crop of eggs that fall to the sediment.  I suppose one could add clean saltwater to the sediment and wait to see if the eggs hatch and nauplii swim to the water column and then decant/harvest the nauplii.  I'll try this next time.

Didn't AlgeGen get their culture from Angi? 

Who's Angi? I have no idea….

Really?  You've responded to numerous threads on MOFIB she posted in... Angi, zooplankton lady from Germany...
 
http://www.marinebreeder....copepod+source+#p82106
 
Her website:  http://www.nanoriffundmeer.de/
 
She was the one that sent all the MOFIB people the Moina, or at least the is my hazy recollection of it.
 
 

 
Yes.  Basically, I kept harassing and harassing Angi until she agreed to ship me some Moina salina.  I also told her about the demand here in the US for Moina, so she decided to send Eric some at the same time she sent me mine, "so there will be a permanent source in the US", as she put it.  That's how it came to be here in the US, most recently.  If there was another source for it in the US before that, nobody on MOFIB or Seahorse.org could locate any.  All leads turned out to be just freshwater Daphnia.

 
 
Hmm,  just spent the last half hour looking up Angi and me.
You think that I can remember one exchange I had through a translation with a person in a thread about Rhodomonas from two years ago?
Really?
I have lots of excuses for having a bad memory: 

•  Post-menopausal, 
• taking medication that prevents sleep, 
• long life of cramming stuff in my brain... There is simply no more room in there!!!! 

Gresham, please find it in your heart to give an old woman a break, will ya, pal?  
 

Well I never had any exchanges with her I don't think.. I just pick up on facts like that

And here's my culture shelf:
I like these square jars.  They take up less space than round ones, and decanting is easy.  Wide mouth makes cleaning easy.  Hand holds make handling easy.  WalMart. Cheap.  M. salina is on the left.  I gotta get some more square jars...

 

@ Gresham, no worries, bro.

M. salina is definately more dense this week. I am seeing lots of larger white twitchers in the culture.
Feeding twice a day now.  Just barely tinting the water.  It does look a bit cloudy. I am not sure if there is bacteria, or if the O marina is causing the cloudiness. I'll renew the culture on the weekend.

This culture has done really well, considering that I had only about 4 individuals when I restarted the culture. I have one gallon of a pretty dense culture, considering that its a copepod.

*AHEM*
 
Moina salina is NOT a copepod.  I know Algagen sells them as part of thier "Reef Pods" line, which includes a bunch of different copepods and, then, also Monia salina.  It also doesn't help any that Vince Rado misdentified Moina salina as a copepod in the caption of one of the images in his recent article in Reef Hobbyist Magazine (and the image isn't even of Moina!).  But still, Moina is a Cladoceran, in a different Class (Cladocera) from copepods, which are in the Class Maxillopoda.  They are all crustaceans, but the similarity ends there, taxonomically.
 
Just had to get that off my chest!
 
Aside from that, good work, Kathy, bringing them back to such numbers starting with so few!

It's good we have you here to keep us accurate!
New word for Kathy:  Cladoceran.

Good for you, Kathy. Mine never came back.

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

really dense culture now.  Water is clear after 8 hours, I am feeding my gallon jar about 100 ml O. marina once a day, and 12 drops of Andy's mix twice a day, with about the same amount of 60g/liter chloramX.  Don't need a microscope to see the swimmers.
    Click the vid:

One of my outdoor tubs that used to be dense with rotifers, and pretty dense with A. panamensis, is now not so dense with rotifers or panamensis, and chock ful of M. salina.

My "clean" indoor culture of M. salina crashed very quickly. I think that ammonia may be the culprit, but really it is inattention by me.  I did not change the jar on schedule.
 
Interestingly, the jar, which I regularly supply with O. marina, had no O. marina in it, just lots of rotifers and ciliates. They did not seem to care about the ammonia.
 
Fortunately, the outdoor tub is chock full of M. salina, even as the weather has cooled significantly.  I'm using some of these daphnia to restart my indoor culture.  I found a couple of Tigriopus californicus in there, but I don't mind as long as the M. salina survive.

I had two jars that I took from my outdoor culture. One when the culture was dominated by M. salina, and then a few weeks later, after a cool spell, one that was dominated by T. californicus.  The M. salina did well, with air and food, and I decanted the jar a few times, but the last time, I kept the sediment and water (about an inch deep in the jar), just set it on the shelf.  When I collected a jar of the T. californicus, I also set it on the shelf, opposite end. 
 
Weeks later, I notice that the T. californicus jar has a nice population of M. salina in it,click on video:

 
and the M. salina jar has a nice population of T. californicus.
 I'm going to have to find a mesh size that keeps the M. salina and allows T. californicus to pass thru.  The sediment jar bloomed with something, so I poured it into a plastic tray with a lid, and a hole in the lid, and that culture continues to do well with sparse feeding, just sitting on the shelf with no further aeration.
 
Thankfully, the A. panamensis culture appears to be uncontaminated.

Here is a microscope shot of the M. salina in the T. californicus jar: I took a pudding cups' worth, about 90 ml, and filtered and backwashed into a small dish to concentrate them. Click on the video, 40x thru the scope:   

I have both T. californicus and M. salina in there.

M. salina seems to be boom and bust.  I get a great culture, and then it crashes.  I guess I need to pay more attention.  I still have a few critters, but I'm out of O. marina and my cultures are suffering under a ciliate load.

So sorry. I'm heading up tomorrow. I just hope there's enough to get a culture started for you. I ran out of food for them.

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 have a few years of experience with freshwater Moina, which i know is not the same as SW moina...but maybe my experience could help.
 
Ive found that no matter what you do (water changes, ammonia absorption resins, feeding frequency, etc) Moina cultures just LOVE to crash.  I keep my current ones in 4-50 gallon garbage cans with a mild air flow in them, and feed them a 1/4 tsp spirulina powder mixed with a 1/4 tsp bakers yeast every 4-5 days.  That has worked the best for me as far as feeding frequency goes.   Using this setup i can get the cultures to the point i cant see the bottom of a white cup if i scoop out 5 oz of water. 
 
Great read btw kathy, you have me wanting to get a jar of these guys growin!

I must say that I share your mishappenings.
I have just killed a new culture,which was received Ok,100% live and nice.
I used my extra careful acclimating protocol,as for copepods.I put the culture in a jar and everyday added 50% of new ASW at 1.010 and some light phyto dose.In 2 days all were gone..I let it stand some time,hoping for some hatching from eggs,but all I got were some rots came as contamination.
Sure,3/4 of the new water was straight from the tap,with perhaps some chlorine,but that was never an issue before.
This was my worst experience,but in the past I had lost the cultures after some time of successful run,both in small indoors and an outside wading pool.
I always expected them to be very easy,much easier than copepods.Because FW aquarists raise their Daphnia in barrels of rainwater with some manure! 
 

I thought they would be easy as well, but they are completely outcompeted by the tigriopus californicus, though I think I may have a few left.  If I can capture them, I'll start anew.  I should be able to filter the adults from the T. californicus.
 

I'm having the same issue with mine. I put them under a microscope and really didn't see anything I hadn't seen before. I was finally going to start my log from when you gave them to me.

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

interesting critters….
I had a jar of T. californicus that I was feeding, and it was thriving, but now its turned into a jar of M. salina.  The tigers came from last summer's outdoor mixed tub of critters.  It was ALL tiggers because the weather was so cool when I harvested them.  Now its mostly Moina. Also, I seem to recall that in jars where the Moina has crashed, tiggers recover.  Boom and bust.
 
I'm feeding all my cultures less these days as I am distracted by my system build, and they seem to do fine.  Haven't done a water change on them in over a month.  I do have live Iso that I feed occasionally.

I am looking to get a start of moina.  I am in central Illinois.  Thanks!  Bob Meyer

Sorry, I don't have any at the moment.  You are the third person who has asked for some.  Why the sudden interest?

check out Kathy's Clowns, llc website:
http://kathysclowns.com
Captive bred clownfish and more
(Wholesale to the trade.)

Most likely the fact that AlgaGen is no longer carrying them.

Jim and Kathy,
I have ordered moina twice in the past 2 years.   One company sent me a dead culture.  Another sent me brine shrimp.  I have been successfully culturing freshwater daphnia and freshwater moina for years.  I wanted to try a marine moina or similar item.  About every 6 months I get on the internet and search for marine moina salinus.  This time, Kathy's article came up.  That gave me the lead to MBI.  Anyway, if someone has marine moina, I am in central Illinois and would like to get a start.  Thanks! 

I have none now, but I expect them to come back when the days get longer and warmer.  Check back with me in a few months.

I think Jim should wait until outdoor temps bloom his culture again and then sell samples to a bunch of us.  Moina salina interests me very much because it appears to tolerate very dense cultures.  Jim, when your culture blooms please let me know, I'd like to buy some from you.
 
Also, who has ideas on how to keep moina as a more steady culture and less boom and bust?  Is ammonia the biggest culprit?  Or is it the inattention that leads to poor water quality from parameters other than ammonia?