Daphnia Culture
I've just recently started keeping live foods again after a long hiatus from fish all together. Completely by accident, I managed to introduce a strain of daphnia into the Hypancistrus rack. To my amazement, it not only survived the 90 degree temperatures, but reproduced at an amazing rate. I now maintain 1 tank on this system as a daphnia spawning tank.
The actual culturing procedure is rather simple. First and foremost,
the flow from the spray bar is cut to a minimum to keep fresh oxygen
rich water flowing into the tank, but limit the amount of bacteria and
daphnia which make it into the main system.Every couple weeks, I drop
a 1 inch cube of raw potato in the tank to feed the bacteria and
infusoria which the daphnia are feeding on. Those which do make it out
of the culture tank, are simply pumped back into one of the tanks.
They have a 1 in 12 chance of making it back home. If they don't make
it back to their tank, the plecos get a bit more protein in their diet.
As I've already stated elsewhere on this site, I use a 5 micron
canister filter inline to my fluidized bed on this system. This means
that the daphnia also get trapped there. This is how I feed the fish
which are not on this system, gudgeons and cyprinidae. I pull the
cartridge every 2 days for cleaning. Before rinsing, or bleaching,
I place the dirty cartridge into whichever tank I decide needs the
live food the most. Those that are trapped on the cartridge, normally
several hundred, simply swim off to their doom. The tank gets a bit
of waste in it from the cartridge, but the daphnia feed off this for a
few days till they are finally all eaten. I believe that they are
eating more waste than is going into the tanks since the bare bottom
tanks are amost always spotless.
