Continuous "natural" feeding

[ddoering]

bah... I hate when I fat-finger and web pages submit unfinished stuff.

I was going to add if you are constantly adding to the system, you need to balance your exports, you are probably already doing this in one way or another, but if you can recycle the nutrients already in the tank to feed your cultures, that is more appealing to me. I have no idea if it is realistic but that is what I want to try and set up. I was actually going to consider a couple of uv's in series to give the contact time to really try to make sure that the only stuff gettnig back in the cultures is dead "fertilizer"

Cheers,
Doug

 

[reptoreef]

Hope you all don't mind if I jump in... I have begun to use a self dosing plankton reactor that doses approx 1 cup of rotifer, tigger pod, and some uneaten phyto ever 12 hours directly to my display tank(a 120 w/a 55 gl fuge and a 28 gl equipment/skimmer sump). This includes 3 vessels: a reservoir of sterile sea water, a light reactor for the phytoplankton, and a rotifer container that overflows into the main display. To help maintain proper salinity, I simply syphon 1 gallon of tank water when the reservoir is looking a bit low and boil it, I then put it into the reservoir and let it cool with the existing water(5 gal covered bucket-dark green in color). The pump comes on for 1 minute every 12 hours and feeds the phytoplankton in which overflows into the rotifers and finally overflows into the display. Everything appears to be working really quite smoothly. If I see that the light reactor is able to sustain a good amount of growth to keep the rotifers(and tiggerpods) fed and reproducing well, I may increase the feedings to 1 cup every 6 hours. Has anybody else tried something similar? BTW the phyto and rotifer reactors are clear 2 liters.

 

[jnarowe]

I would love to see a picture of your set up if you can. It would be cool if all of those posting here with current systems would post pics. I am really interested in continuous feeding and need some guidance. I don't want to dose phyto into my tank as the resulting PO4 would be difficult to handle, but dosing tigger pods, or even just my own frozen food mix would be nice.

What about a reservoir held in my refrigerator and plumbed to a dosing pump? And then a small power head in the reservoir to stir the mixture?

 

[reptoreef]

The phyto should be ok so long as it's alive...

 

[jnarowe]

well, my skimmer is a phyto busting machine anyway...

anyone have any thoughts on my idea for for frozen food?

 

[JCTewks]

I think that if you had the fridge within a foot of the tank, and no more than 12-18"total distance from the fridge to the tank you could do it. You could try having the frozen food in phyto instead of just water...would enrich it a little too. just thaw 3 days worth, strain the water off, and put it in a phyto liguid so the dosing pump can move it.

 

[GreshamH]

Eeeks....You ever leave thawed seafood in your fridge for three days? I have, not good

 

[JCTewks]

okay...i see your point. Just trying to make it so your not having to refill with newly thawed food daily....anybody got any better suggestions?

 

[dendro982]

Let take a small break form the phyto culturing :

Do you know anything small (less than a dorm fridge) and inexpensive for dosing multiple day feedings, for a small dry foods like cyclop eezy and golden pearls?

When it comes to continuous feeding of the frozen food - we are still limited by necessity of refrigeration, right?

Although Jens Kallmeyer described somewhere using the centrifugal tube with fine frozen food, placed in the tank and slowly thawing for a few hours, and, if I remember right, ldrhawke with drilled upside down fish food bottle with small hole in the lid, placed upside down and contacting water - the fish has possibility to pick itself, if wants to. Something like DIY continuous fish feeder.

 

[LegendLand]

i used a constant feeding method once, didnt do too good, consisted of a feeding unit with some cyclop-eeze positioned directly over the coral, but it only worked short term, after a while it stopped putting food into the tank. & it never put all the food in the unit into the tank either, just locked up.

 

[reptoreef]

"Umm, fish?",

I suppose with your design, along with the uv sterilizer, adding the use of an ozone reactor would almost definitely insure that contamination would be impossible.

 

["Umm fish?"]

Oh, I'm sorry, it's not my design. I was posting Biffer's design so everyone could see it, as I couldn't get his Word document to work on my Mac. I should have made that more clear. But, yeah, I'm just hosting the JPEGs for him.

His design makes sense to me, though, as long as the water flow through the ozone is slow enough to kill _everything_ that might contaminate the phyto. I would also put a carbon chamber after the ozone, but that's just me. The big thing is to make sure that you can control any contamination after the ozone chamber.

 

[timrandlerv10]

why are we using frozen food?

what about live pods, live bbs, live rots?

i think there are two camps: those who would defrost, clean and stock frozens every other/day, and those who would use live.

why arent the dry food people speaking up?

i cant let the phyto culture drop
--cause thats how you can maintain your salinity--that water is coming it at 1.018-1.021, so enough phyto dosing makes up for your topoff water.

add 2 gallons of new phyto-sourced water, drain off .5 gallons of dirty water, lose 1.5 to evaporation...

 

[dendro982]

OK, I'm one of dry food people. Who wants to live on a dry food, if there is other choice? May be you can help:

Recently started the frozen food - cyclops and rotifers: cheaper, then dry and no need for mail order - available in LFS (although not always).

The required food range is ~50-600 micron zooplankton, so the choice is (Canada) rotifers and baby brine.

1. Keeping rotifer culture requires feeding by frozen algae paste (not available in LFS, mail order of frozen food costs a lot), or maintaining phytoplankton culture.

1.1. Keeping phytoplankton culture requires additional time, space (away from the living zone, even Rena and Tetra air pumps are not a welcome additions to the everyday life), light and fertilizer.

1.1.1. Fertilizer: what else kinds of Miracle Gro can be used? And how to wash out the fertilizer from culture before adding to the tank? Very reluctant to add fertilized water.

Tried, the phyto culture crashed. BTW, every trial costs a month of dry food feeding

2. Baby brine:
Problem with decapsulation (or removing shells) before adding hatched brine to the tank - fish was irritated, when added as is.

3. Refugium, where the microfood will grow by itself (or reproductive material of the stomatellas and other macro-inhabitants), using the tank water.

I had less problems with difficult to keep species, finesse of refugiums is beyond my understanding: I tried 4 times refugiums, at least half of year each, all become the source of pollution for the main tank and were disconnected. Red slime, acoel worms, in some cases - dinoflagellates. Still have two, free standing, may be I can revive them with your help.

This is OOT for this thread, may be some of you will be willing to make the thread "Make it your own: Troubleshooting for refugiums and live food cultures" for help the refugium and LF challenged, like me.

Thanks.

P.S. I did my search and research

 

[jnarowe]

dendro982: It's much easier and cheaper to make your own food and freeze it. That's what I do. I go to the local asian market and pick up mixed seafood (I remove the clam), shredded nori, get fresh seafood from the grocery store, add vitamins, garlic guard, mysid & brine, and whatever else I can get my hands on. I basically "kitchen sink" it and try to switch up from batch to batch. I usually add spirulina, frozen Formula One or Two, etc.

Then I blend it in a food processor, partially fill gallon ziplocks, and roll out flat. Then into the freezer they go. When it's time to feed, I break off a piece and soak it in tank water with more vitamins and shredded nori. When it's thawed, I strain it and feed it to the tank slowly.

This is essentially the Melev method as described in one of his podcast videos.

I rarely feed dry food, and that is only as a small snack at random times, and only with Spectrum pellets or spirulina pellets. I also leave my pumps on, contrary to conventional wisdom, and allow the food to disperse in the water column at a fairly high rate. This is more a function of system size tgough, and I don't recommend that for the average size tank.

 

[dendro982]

Thanks, very kind of you!

I already tried both - the Melev's and Blundell's recipes, the problem is, that I have no customers to eat the main mass of the mix - above 700 micron, but below 1.5mm (1/32"), that is suitable for a fish. Too much water pollution (my filtration and skimming is far from perfect, although equipment is fairly good).

What I'm doing now - set a separate tank for a non-photosynthetic corals, and feed them the food of the known range: approximately 600 micron for large-polyped gorgonians, 200-500 for smaller-polyped ones and chilis, 50-100 for a small blue ones. This way I can add consumable amount of the food. Less pollution.

Not that all is used, of course - the next problem is to keep it afloat for a long time

 

[jnarowe]

I would love to see pictures of your system. I know the Vortech pumps I have keep food in suspension for a very long time.

 

[dendro982]

Mine? They are miserable high maintenance nano - because of multiple hand feeding and leftovers settle on the bottom, and have to be removed by hand - but they work.

If you still wish to see the photos, I'll post them tomorrow.

Aren't Vortech pumps high gph and very expensive? Somehow I got that impression, reading forums.

 

[jnarowe]

yes and yes. a good Maxi-Jet mod will do about the same in terms of keeping the food in suspension long enough for it to be consumed.

I am always up for pics!!

 

[dendro982]

Done. Too many photos - had to place in a separate thread , sorry.

Unfortunately, Maxi-Jet, especially modded, will require much bigger tanks, or corals will not open for a feeding - the flow should be aside of polyps/worms' crowns, not bend them.