An O. marina culture manual

Andy's culture procedures, Oxyrrhis marina:

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.
• Aerate.
• Add ammonia control (ClorAmX) twice per day.
• Add food. (See feeding, below).
• You can double the water volume about every 12 hours. (Probably more often, but don't get greedy.)

Twice per 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.

1. Do you see a cloud that resolves itself into lots of tiny dots? That's good. That's what you are looking for.
2. Do you see really cloudy water that doesn't resolve to tiny dots? That's bad. That could be a bacteria bloom. There's not a lot you can do about a bacterial bloom with these, except cut back on feeding a little bit and hope. It works sometimes. I usually toss these cultures and start from a split from another culture.
3. Do you see bigger specks swimming around? You could be contaminated with ciliates, rotifers, or copepods. Pass the culture through a 27 micron screen (for ciliates) or 54 micron screen (for anything else).

• Double the water volume with clean saltwater.
• Feed the culture (See feeding, below).
• Add ammonia control (ClorAmX) twice per day.

If your culture container is now full of water but the dinoflagellate population still seems sparse, check what you are feeding them. Try increasing the amount of food or try adding something else to your food mix.

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.

1. Do you see a cloud that resolves itself into lots of tiny dots? That's good. That's what you are looking for.
2. Do you see really cloudy water that doesn't resolve to tiny dots? That's bad. That could be a bacteria bloom. There's not a lot you can do about a bacterial bloom with these, except cut back on feeding a little bit and hope. It works sometimes. I usually toss these cultures and start from a split from another culture.
3. Do you see bigger specks swimming around? You could be contaminated with ciliates, rotifers, or copepods. Pass the culture through a 27 micron screen (for ciliates) or 54 micron screen (for anything else).

• Siphon off at least 1/5 and up to about half of the culture volume through a ~50 micron sieve. Feed what passes through the sieve to your copepods.
• Replace the water volume with clean water.

Twice per day.

• Add food. (See feeding, below.)
• Add ammonia control (ClorAmX).

Periodic maintenance.

• Roughly every three days I pass the entire culture through a ~50 micron sieve and into a new culture. I made up a special sieve on a 6" piece of PVC that I stand on an egg crate grating above the new bucket so I can just pour one bucket into another. That's the fastest way I've found to do this.
• Every once in a while, I will strain an entire culture through a 27 micron screen. That gets out almost all the contaminants that I have, except for a small, long protist that doesn't seem to do any harm and might also be food for copepods; macroalgae spores that are annoying and are the main reason for the three day schedule for new buckets; and, of course, bacteria.

Feeding

• Live food. You can feed these critters with live algae such as Nanno (maybe) and T-Iso (better). I've not had a whole lot of luck with culturing phyto, so I can't help so much here.
• Algae paste. This is what I do: Twice per day, I feed the cultures a mixture of 1 drop (1/20th of a milliliter) of RotiGrow+ AND 6 drops of NRich PL for each gallon of culture water. Since I culture in 2 gallon containers, I feed 2 drops RG+ and 12 drops NRich, twice per day. They eat a LOT of food. Both pastes are available from Reed Mariculture.

 
Other stuff
Movie
Here is what a half a pint of O. marina culture looks to the naked (or in my case, bifocaled) eye:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5inYysNi5k

That was just taken with an iPhone and an LED flashlight. The smallest of the dots you see are O. marina. The larger dots are contaminants of some kind. Small culture debris (I had just strained this culture through 50 microns), or maybe dust motes from the pint jar.

Special thanks to Grover for letting me use his little muppet belly as a backdrop. (It's actually a towel, but it sure looks like Grover to me.)
 
Photos.
I'm putting up more of Jim's outstanding photos (that he has graciously allowed me to use). Thanks, Jim!
 
This is an O. marina culture right before feeding. Note that the healthy culture is always a little light brown.
 

 
And after feeding:
 

 
And microscope images of the dinoflagellate:
 

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