[Aadler]

If anyone is interested I would be more than happy to supply anyone with a bottle of pods. However, only if this is something you are interested in raising.. dont try and use me to feed your starving mandarin! It is very simple and only requires containers, a few cups of saltwater and an air pump. I raise them in my basement which is about 70 degrees. I have done it to supplement food for a mandarin, but their are other fish and reasons to want more pods in your tank.

Please note, that if more than a few people are interested in this they will have to wait a few weeks to get a bottle, because I see no point in giving you a fresh bottle with just a few pods in there.

It is a simple set up that I will explain to let someone who may be interested but does not know how.

First I use a 2.5g aga aquarium with about 1-3 inches of water (I do nothing for evap... nor do i test salinity every so often i need to add fresh salt water). I put my 'seed' bottle of pods in there and drop in a few eye droppers worth of DT's Phytoplankton, most stores around the area sell this, it is needed, however you could try other methods, but this one works well for me.

Once I notice a good number of pods crawling on the side of the 'mother' tank i take a 1/4 inch piece of tubing and get a siphon going and start sucking pods off the side of the tank into a water bottle (i use costco brand 20oz? water bottles... thats what i had around, anything would work, id use only water bottles just so you dont have to clean them out.) It takes 10-20 days for the pod population to regrow and you can get 1-4 bottles per collection time with a decent number of pods in each bottle. Then you hook each bottle up to an air line and drop 3 eye droppers worth of DT's into each bottle and let it sit. (I drill a hole big enough to fit an air line through in the bottle cap) Every 3-5 days you need to re-dose the DT's. To get increased growth you can put in more DT's I have stayed away from this because i dont want to crash the bottles or tanks (if you put in to much food you will get ammonia levels to high for the pods due to the rotting phyto).

So, you would need, a mother tank, an air pump (or pumps), air line, air line splitter (i currently use two 2way splitters and 2 4way splitters but only have two mother tanks and 5 bottles going at the moment.

In theory you could get a nice small set up going with one air pump, one 4way splitter, one two way splitter, one 2.5 tank and 4 water bottles. this way you could seed one bottle every week from your mother tank and be dumping a new bottle into your display tank every week and giving each bottle 4 weeks to reproduce.

I want to reaffirm that I do not have enough to supply the east side of cleveland by any stretch, but I have kept the cultures growing for a few months now and it is fairly easy and want to help anyone out that is interested in this.

If more than a handful of people want to give it a shot I will pm you once I have a new bottle for you could be a few weeks, could be a few months. But that will give you time to buy the few things you may need.

Mike