Large scale copepod culture (Parvocalanus and Acartia)

Aloha everyone,
 
I'm a Ph.D student with the University of Southern Mississippi and have a multiyear grant on optimizing the large scale/ intensive culture of copepods (Parvocalanus crassirostris and Acartia tonsa) along how to best use them as feed (size, timing, optimizing nutrition).  Although my work will be for large scale production most of the data will probably benefit the small scale culture of the species. As the project progresses I'll be updating with results and posting some pics of our systems.  I'll mainly be looking at temp., salinity, density, diet along with working with Reed Mariculture to see if we can develop an algae concentrate diet that is comparable to live algae.  We are will be testing feeding protocols of several food fish species and will try to do some trials with an ornamental or two if I can get some eggs.
 
If anyone has any questions about rearing copepods fell free to contact me or if you have anything that you think we should test I'll see what we can do.
 
Thanks

If you and Reed can create any substitute for live algae for Parvo you will be making a major contribution to the hobby.  Good luck.  

I  wish you well in this, its a great project. Please keep us posted, when do you start or have you already?  I have to bring up Martin Moe's V8 method, I have used it, when cultures crashed, now I make reserves for the reserves, and will still keep some V8 handy.  I am also interested in the Acartia.  I am glad  that you are starting this.

Jake
We are all in this together

I've never tried does Moe's v8 recipe although I have thought about it.  I will give it a shot, but I think it might work better on some of the other species of copepods? I have a Euterpina culture that might like it. The main benefit to Acartia is we can store the eggs but the production #'s for Parvocalanus are a lot better at least at this point, plus the size benefit.
 
Thanks

Trying different species with different feeds is almost mandatory, the V8 has quite a bit of flocculent/settlement, but the rotifers and copepods will take it while other cultures come back. I do want to be trying the acartia too,
 
I am in process of moving, have stuff all over the compass it seems, a  couple places in MI and more in upstate NY. I'll be several months getting it all home, but it needs to be.  I have some stuff in southern Ca. too, near Scripps but it will stay there, it has a good home.
 
Anyhow, I am hyped at your project, anything I can do let me know, my table is cleared and this is my project for the duration.
 
 

Jake
We are all in this together

Attached are some pictures of our main production system.  The total culture volume of our production system is ~60,000L and currently we can consistently produce at least 25 million Acartia nauplii a day. Once we get Parvo. in our large system I'm think we can get at least 250 million a day depending on algae availability. As you can imagine it takes a lot of algae and several people to run the system at full capacity but we are making headway on trying to make it as efficient as possible.
 
I'm currently setting up to conduct temperature trials next month, which will be done in small volumes for now.

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Very impressive !  I like !

Jake
We are all in this together

That is a large production facility for pods!  If your producing that many, I have to assume you are feeding them to larval fish.  Tell me all about it!  Please! 

Clayton, you beat me to that question!  I'm sure the grant is specifically to study the pod production, but I too was wondering what they are doing with all those pods once they are in production and harvesting.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ken

You both beat me to that question.  That don't look nothing like my mommy's basement.  
 
I bet the picture he won't show you is on the other side of the cinderblock wall.  There are 80,000 cola bottles with cotton stuffed in the ends, each sitting on a rickety plastic bookshelf above the washer/dryer!  
 
 

Currently I'm culturing them for my experiment in 5 gallon buckets and some 1 gallon pitchers from wal-mart so it's not all high class
 
We mainly use our copepods for our Red Snapper rearing, they need copepods for about the first 14 days before we can switch them to rotifers. We only breed snapper during the summer so we start ramping up production next month and go to about Sept., after that we mostly just do our copepod rearing experiments.  I'd like to try other fish species as it's kind of a waist to have all there copepods and we often throw them away so I'm looking into other species.  The main problem is although I have money to do larval rearing trials I don't have time/money to develop broodstock for other species so I'm looking into acquiring eggs from other places that already have spawning fish.  Also the grant is mainly for commercial species of the gulf coast, although I've been given the ok to do an ornamental or two if I can get the eggs.

So who is going to send him some eggs?
 
Frankly I am clueless as to how to do it other then in a kordon bag with phytoplankton in it.  Anybody near him with breeding angels?

Jake
We are all in this together

An update
 
A photo of my temperature baths, I'm doing 20, 22.5, 25, 27.5, 30 C.  I should be able to start the trials by the end of April, now just acclimating them to the temperatures for several generations.  I've already done some preliminary trials at 20, 25 and 30 which have had some interesting results.
 
Stay tuned 

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Care to share the initial results? 
 

Jake
We are all in this together

I don't want to spoil the surprise
 
I can't say too much until I get the results from all the temperatures. However what I can say is that temperature affects the size of the copepods, as temperature decreases they become larger.  It's not a large change in size but it was significant for both species so is probably the case for all species. Acartia have a wider temperature range, while it's hard to maintain a Parvo culture at 30C.  Lastly but probably more important is that different strains/isolates of the different species may have different growth/size characteristics.  Although this is not surprising, if you are going by what other people say or research papers do not expect to get the same results as very few papers say where theirs came from.  For instance the Parvo from Hawaii are larger than those from Australia. I'm working with a Hawaii isolate of Parvo. crassirostris, if you get them from Reed Mariculture you should get similar results as they at one point got some from me to supplement their culture.

Thanks, its a place to start, depending on your findings I may well culture in the basement rather then the fish room. I'll be looking forward to your  results.   

Jake
We are all in this together

Interesting information Adam.  I culture my Parovs at 26C, and cool them down sometimes to slow egg production.  Very curious about the 20C test group.  The ability to culture the Parvos at low temperatures would be very useful for culturing cold water species of fish.  Also, smaller nauplii or adults may ship better and be more tolerant to cold shipping conditions.  I look forward to your results and statistical analysis. 
 
Chad

All of my pods (Parvo, Tisbe, tiggers, Euterpina) are at my basement room temp which varies from 68F winter to 72F summer. So far all are performing well, but I certainly only have very small batches for hobbyist use. I have never tried ramping up much.

I am most interested to hear your final results on alternative feeds for Parvo!

Btw, are you based at Gulf Coast Research Labs? I spent a summer there a few years (well, actually decades) ago during undergrad. Loved every minute of it!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ken

Great news that there's more research going into pod culture. We've found that fresh algae and clean water can help increase numbers by a lot (no surprise), but getting some more data on the culture parameters for these guys would certainly help the hobby/trade/industry to attempt more fish with copepods as a first or supplemental first feed.
 
If you're interested in trying some blue tang (P. hepatus), we can provide eggs/larvae. They seem pretty durable, so it might be worth it to see if we could ship them to you (the larvae would hatch in the bag overnight, but you'd have early larvae to work with).
We won't be doing many rearing attempts until the long-awaited new larval system is completed in a couple of weeks, and we get lots of eggs almost every day (although the big spawns are around the full moon).
 
Edit: This is Matt from SA, PM me for contact info if interested

I'm guessing you have found these papers but I'll list them just in case you havent. Feel free to PM me as I have read around this area in the literature. 
 
Improvement in the reproductive productivity of the tropical calanoid
copepod Parvocalanus crassirostris through selective breeding
Fahad Alajmi ⁎, Chaoshu Zeng, Dean R. Jerry
 
Development of intensive copepod culture technology for Parvocalanus
crassirostris: Optimizing adult density
M. Dean Kline ⁎, Charles W. Laidley
 
Development of an optimal microalgal diet for the culture of the
calanoid copepod Acartia sinjiensis: Effect of algal species and
feed concentration on copepod development
Richard M. Knuckeya,T, Gale L. Semmensa, Robert J. Mayerb, Michael A. Rimmera
 
A review of the use of copepods in marine fish larviculture
 O. O. Ajiboye •  A. F. Yakubu •  T. E. Adams •
 E. D. Olaji •  N. A. Nwogu
 
Camus, Thomas (2012) The improvement of copepods intensive culutre protocols as live feeds for aquaculture hatcheries. 
http://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/29905/
 
 

Any updates on this?  I am very interested in how this develops.  I'm thnking of setting some up in the basement along with the cultures in the fish room.

Jake
We are all in this together