Is it worth the money to add copepods?

wcfost

New member
I've got a 55g mixed sps/lps/softy tank with sump that's been running for just shy of 2 years now. As far as fish, I've got 1 green chromis, 1 bangaii, 1 small six line wrasse, 1 black blenny, and 1 black ray high fin goby with his pistol shrimp companion. As far as I'm concerned, I'm fully stocked and have no plans to add more fish.

Anyway, while I used to see COUNTLESS copepods and amphipods in the refugium, over the past several months their numbers have declined and now I hardly see any. I expect the wrasse is the main reason for this, which is great, but I'd like to shore up the # of those little critters somehow.

So my question is, is it worth the money (20 bucks at my LFS) to buy a bunch of them and introduce them to the refugium? Do they even survive or will they be mostly DOA or just get gobbled up before they can multiply?
 
replenishing them is a good idea i think. Long as you put them in the sump/refugium they'll multiply and be release to the main system
 
not really ... but I have bought many lol

try to find a local trimming back their cheato, they are always full of pods, get some from them and put it in your fuge ..

or even a small piece of LR ...
 
They cost like $15..........and they eat detritus and are food for the fish.........well worth it in my mind.

Steve
 
well worth it to replenish them. Also if your fish are used to eating them, I would personally keep having pods for them to eat.
 
If you don't have a specialized feeder such as a mandarin in your tank, I'd save your money. Pods are kind of overrated IMO. If they completely disappeared from my tank it wouldn't really change anything. Still happy & healthy...
 
If you don't have a specialized feeder such as a mandarin in your tank, I'd save your money. Pods are kind of overrated IMO. If they completely disappeared from my tank it wouldn't really change anything. Still happy & healthy...

I agree with this. At the same time if you don't have a fish who's diet is pod demanding there shouldn't be a need to replenish anyways they reproduce very quickly.
 
I agree with this. At the same time if you don't have a fish who's diet is pod demanding there shouldn't be a need to replenish anyways they reproduce very quickly.

Unless you have amphipods & mysids (both hunt copepods) and a falling food supply for the copepods. It rather common for new tanks to have massive copepod blooms and old tank (irregardless of fish mates) to have none.
 
not really ... but I have bought many lol

try to find a local trimming back their cheato, they are always full of pods, get some from them and put it in your fuge ..

or even a small piece of LR ...

+1

Have never bought pods, but have had very visible populations from simply buying a 5$ bag of cheato every now and then.
 
I say add them, but if you are going to also dose live phytoplankton... i stopped dosing live phyto and all my pods died off
 
In my tank ( a 55 with a 15 gal sump/refug) I got my pod population going by buying a clump of cheato. The population went up. I had large amounts of copapods, isopods and amphipods both in the main tank and refugium. I got a scooter blenny and he began eating the pods with gusto. then for some reason the pod population crashed in the refug. little to none on the isopods. very few amphipods, and just barely enough copapods to keep the scooter eating. I have two good sized balls of cheato but no visible pod in them. I probably had a minicycle when i added some new DIY concrete base rock. But the ammonia levels were were at the lowest level on my test kit. Any Ideas? I would like to get my pod population back up.
 
If you are going to buy pods make sure not to buy tigger pods, as they are harvested from colder waters and they do not live long in our tanks. You can buy the bag of pods that are harvested and raised from home systems. My local fish stores sell them here and the bag comes with a small amount of cheato in it. What i have done in the past is setup a 5g tank with a sponge filter and gone to my main system took a small syringe and sucked up as many pods as i can see. I put them all in the 5g and added some phyto to it once i have a enough in the 5g i would do a water change in the 5g. Then add the pods to the tank and it replaces all the pods in my system
 
In my tank ( a 55 with a 15 gal sump/refug) I got my pod population going by buying a clump of cheato. The population went up. I had large amounts of copapods, isopods and amphipods both in the main tank and refugium. I got a scooter blenny and he began eating the pods with gusto. then for some reason the pod population crashed in the refug. little to none on the isopods. very few amphipods, and just barely enough copapods to keep the scooter eating. I have two good sized balls of cheato but no visible pod in them. I probably had a minicycle when i added some new DIY concrete base rock. But the ammonia levels were were at the lowest level on my test kit. Any Ideas? I would like to get my pod population back up.

A blenny can decimate a pod population a lot faster than you think. How much of your 15 gallon sump is dedicated to the refugium? That's not enough space to replendish the pod population that the blenny is eating.
 
I can see fish as the cause of the copepods dwindling in the main tank, but if they disappear in a refugium there's either not enough food for them or some animals decimate them. Either way a new seeder batch won't do much to replenish the population.

The only time adding them would make sense is if they died because of a treatment (like interceptor) or of some issues that have since been remedied. Genetic problems might lead to declining populations too, but I think that's usually a non-issue in our tanks.
 
I have never bothered to add pods. I bought a bunch from R2Go at one point but they proved incapable of actually sending me my order, so I cancelled it. My own personal opinion is that in a reef tank with plenty of food input, and lots of hiding places, you'll get a sustainable population anyhow. I have a large system, with lots of rock and chaeto, and it supports a mandarin and leopard wrasse just fine without supplemental pods. It would be interesting to see if side by side, 'identical' tanks with and without pod additions actually showed differences in sustainable populations after say a year. My guess is that in order for there to be much difference you'd have to be adding pods continually.
 
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