High Tide Aquatics

I want to grow pods, someone school me...

I used 1 gallon iced tea containers to culture pods when I had the mandarin. The spouts on the bottom made it easy to harvest the pods. I had three going and that didn't really make a dent on her pod consumption. I'd say each 1 gallon container could give you a quart of water a day and it would probably contain 50'ish pods. Mandarins eat hundreds of pods a day. I think you'd be better off with at least two 5 gallon buckets. You want to keep at least two cultures in case one crashes.

Best to start with some dry rock to make sure that no pod predators hitchhike in. I kept some chaeto in mine to give them more surface area. The Tisbe pods seemed to do best when I fed them coral or fish food, not phyto. I think the Tisbe pods are the best for dragonets since they stay tend to stay on rock surfaces, but they are small. The Tisbe or Tigger is what you usually find at the LFS.

The pods from reefs2go seemed to be 100% isopods. The Pods+ from reeflcleaners was 100% copepods when I ordered. http://www.reefcleaners.org/aquarium-store/pods

PS: My comment above about the skinny mandarin was not about yours. He looks pretty healthy...
 
So earlier today before your post I ordered 2000 pods from reefs2go and I guess I'll dump all of it in the sump.

I'll order Pods+ and start cultures from them in a couple of 1 gallon containers then move to 5 gallon if I get them going successfully. while skimming through searches earlier today I came across a few mentions of "pod condos" and keeping a culture in 10g tanks instead of jugs/bottles. Any insight there? I haven't yet had a chance to research that specifically....

*I refined my reply from earlier ;)
 
HiFidelity said:
So earlier today before your post I ordered 2000 pods from reefs2go and I guess I'll dump all of it in the sump.

I'll order Pods+ and start cultures from them in a couple of 1 gallon containers then move to 5 gallon if I get them going successfully. while skimming through searches earlier today I came across a few mentions of "pod condos" and keeping a culture in 10g tanks instead of jugs/bottles. Any insight there? I haven't yet had a chance to research that specifically....

*I refined my reply from earlier ;)
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clear tanks tend not to work as well for zooplankton cultures.
 
I have a couple of acrylic sumps that I'm thinking of using. I'm trying to get a remote fuge going but that might take me a little bit of time to put together so I'm thinking perhaps I can use one of the acrylic tanks since it has a baffle in the middle so I can put macro algae & rock rubble on one side of it to get a culture started.

So the idea is using one acrylic tank for feeding/culturing pods with an air source and phyto for food. The other with macroalgae can act as a feeding tank, this one I won't dump phyto in, instead I can sieve pods from the first tank & dump them in the second one for holding till I feed which will simply mean opening a valve & draining water into my system. I came up with this concept because I'm not too crazy about using a sieve every time I feed pods, instead the second tank will have them ready to be scooped out and won't have heavy concentrations of Phyto going into DT, How does this plan sound?

Gresh, correct me if I'm wrong but Tisbe pods are what I'm looking for if I'm looking to feed a Mandarin?
 
Tisbe or Tigriopus will be good.


Tisbe don't really need phyto as much as they need larger items, Tiggers need phyto and good strains, not nanno.

I see a problem with your idea... phyto needs to be cultured away from your zooplankton and in a closed container. Phyto is easily crashed from contaminants.

Most zooplankton are positively phototactic (ugh, the other term is escaping me right now) (attracted to light),ich is why clear tanks aren't the best for this purpose.
 
Hi Gresh, I'm not dealing with culturing phyto right away so I'll be purchasing the phyto I feed in the beginning. This way I can focus on growing pods & once that's accomplished I can begin working on culturing phyto.

For someone who is starting out with this (me) would Tiggers or Tisbe be a better choice to begin with?
 
Anytime you use live, you are culturing it at the same time. It doesn't stop growing/dividing. If you are going to use it how you want, you'll need to deal with its growth in some manor, or does live/concentrated daily, if not more.

Tiggers tend to be more forgiving on the care side, and typically easier to obtain.

Really, its best to figure out the food source first (if live, how to culture). I'd concentrate on both as the copepods aren't going to take much effort, but their food source can.
 
jonmos75 said:
Fidel,

look at this it might be something that will work for you...

http://apbreed.com/product_compact_culture_system.php
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Hi John, thanks for sharing that I totally missed this comment. This system is for Rotifers and I'm looking to culture larger pods.

On a side note, I did get a hold of someone at reefnutrition but the answer was of no use, in short it was something along the lines of "you can't culture our phyto but you can purchase as much as you like"

That might work as a short term solution, exactly as I intended to use the product but further down the line I'm just going to try one of the kits from florida-aqua-farms.com as instructed on melvesreef.com and see if I can successfully start a phyto culture from that. For now I'm going to try to start a culture of Tigger Pods from reefnutrition and feed them phyto-feast till I have my own phyto cultures going.

Lastly, if my fish end up loving white worms (specially the mandarin) I might just chuck the whole culture idea and buy bottled pods to seed my fuge a couple times a year.
 
We do not offer technical support on growing phytoplankton as we offer no live single species cultures. Phyto-Feast Live is many species, so there will only be one (plus using such a dense starter like PF is a great recipe for failure). There's plenty of info on the net for that one. We however do offer zooplankton culture support for the species we culture ourselves.

MBI is a great place to get support on culturing phytoplankton, and copepods.
 
You feeding him the worms?

@Bluprntguy You're right. I've been trying to feed him often but he's losing more weight than he can pack on with food. He eats frozen/live pods but not enough of it even the tigger pods I'm throwing in there aren't enough. I'm going to have to give him away. Probably to a LFS.
 
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Enderturtle said:
You feeding him the worms?

@Bluprntguy You're right. I've been trying to feed him often but he's losing more weight than he can pack on with food. He eats frozen/live pods but not enough of it even the tigger pods I'm throwing in there aren't enough. I'm going to have to give him away. Probably to a LFS.
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You might want to post on the boards here before you take him to a LFS. There might be someone with a larger tank that's willing to take him.
 
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