[oceanarus]

Wow, a lot of questions! Sorry about being so slow getting around to answering them.

do you have water standing still there?

For the most part yes, all that is in the tank is a 50 Watt heater and an airstone driven sponge filter that is kept very low and gets turned up slowly over time.

With light on top?

Yes, a 15 watt NO flourescent bulb.

How are you keeping rotifers and fry concentrated in a "cloud"?

They are doing it on their own The rotifers tend to concentrate over the heater so I guess the temperature gradient is concentrating them. And I assume the fry are attracted to the rotifers.

What are the pollutant levels in your rearing tanks? How often do you change water? How do you clean the detritus?

To be honest I don't know. I clean 20 to 23 baby tanks every day, I just don't do a whole lot of testing (I do enough testing on my reef tanks ). Cleaning their tank is easy for the first two weeks while the fry are in the water coulmn, but becomes very difficult when they start to hang out on the bottom. Just use a small diameter tube, like airline tube, and keep a finger over the other end to regulate/stop flow to keep from sucking one of them up.

I guess the watchman fry are very tiny.

When they are first hatched, they are small enough for week old ocellaris fry to eat them.

Are they phototropic as well?

It appers that way.

where did you get S-strain of rotifers and what is the difference in size/behaviour between S- and L-strains? Are they the same spieces just sorted out by the size?

The current culture I have going now started out from cysts I got through some special contacts. PM me if you need some culture, I have provided and continue to offer to provide some free of charge (you pay shipping) to breeders. I believe there is a picture in my gallery that illustrates the size difference. They are actully different species, the L-strain is B. plicatilis and the S-strain is B. rotundaformis.

How old do they have to be before we can start buying them off of you?

For the past couple of weeks I have been taking a few to the LFS's in our area. It seems that they are going to be good sellers even at the 1"-1.5" size. People love to have small cute fish for their nano-reefs. And they do change back to the normal yellow color when they get into a tank where they can burrow or hide out in a cave.