Copepods

[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

[calypso1]

i would be interested! most definantly!

[arbee]

I would be interested also. Darn, I just dumped my last bottle of pods in the fuge yesterday. If I would have known it was this easy to raise these, I would have tried. Have all the equipment too.
Do you ship? If so, pm me how much for the pods and shipping.
Rita

[Burgman]

HI,

Did you ever think of giving a demo at one of the Csea meetings?

Dave

[Aadler]

Originally posted by arbee
I would be interested also. Darn, I just dumped my last bottle of pods in the fuge yesterday. If I would have known it was this easy to raise these, I would have tried. Have all the equipment too.
Do you ship? If so, pm me how much for the pods and shipping.
Rita

Im not shipping, im not selling, just giving away if someone wants to learn how to do this they can take a look at my set up, it is VERY easy. I am within 5 minutes of 271 and 480 so it is very easy to get to me.

[Aadler]

Originally posted by Burgman
HI,

Did you ever think of giving a demo at one of the Csea meetings?

Dave

No like I said I have just done this for the past few months, it is not something that could really be demonstrated, I can easily set up a visual presentation to help people figure it out, also anyone that grabs some will obviously be able to look at how to do this.

I feel I must state this again, I am not selling pods... I wont give you a bottle every month to save your starving mandarin, if you want to try to raise them I will gladly give you a bottle and show you how to set it up. I do this on a very small scale, but after seeing how easy it is, anyone could do this and likely have much better success with a mandarin. I should note that my mandarin is very thin IMO, I did not want one, my wife wanted one and I of course caved into her wish. I dont expect it to stave to death however. (this last paragraph is not aimed at you dave, just for the thread in general!)

Mike

[Fdfiremedic]

I would like to try. LMK

[oldreefer76]

we are interested in trying also

[Brad Black]

Same here. Do you think they can just be bred/fed in a fuge to supply the main tank automatically over time? That would be my goal if possible. Thanks. Would like to see at a Csea meeting too.

[GSMguy]

I need to restart my pod population after a red bug treatment, let me know when you have some available.

[Aadler]

Originally posted by Brad Black
Same here. Do you think they can just be bred/fed in a fuge to supply the main tank automatically over time? That would be my goal if possible. Thanks. Would like to see at a Csea meeting too.

Well, that is the reason for a fuge, however, you keep this water slightly green at all times with phyto, so i would not think you would want that hooked up to your DT ;c). They other thing is I try to build up a fairly dense population before putting a water bottle into my tank (be it fuge or directly into the DT), and unless you have super SLOW flow through the fuge you would not see the number of pods you do in a separate setup. Also, with the excess food in the separate setup you get MUCH faster population expansion than you would if there is any type of predation (IE falling over the overflow into the DT).

[Aadler]

Just an update, I have a pretty good list of people and am going to split some cultures in two today and let them build back up, but figure on next weekend working out for a pickup time for most people.

[Brad Black]

Very thoughtful for doing this , thank you.

[Dtip]

I have pods crawling all over my DT, but I didn't realize how easy it would be to set up a non-connected farm like this. I'll give it a try with what pods I can grab out of my DT.

[Aadler]

ya, just grab some airline and start a syphon and suck them off the glass, dump some DT's in the container and an airpump and you are set.

mike

[spookey]

I would like to try this...