Isocrysis Problem

[justmedanny]

Hello, I'm in need of some help and I can't seem to find any information on the problem I'm having. I ordered 3 phytoplankton disks from Florida Aqua Farms: Nannochlorpus, Tetraselmis, and Isocrysis. I have cultured phytoplankton before and had excellent results with Nanno and Tetra. But the Iso always dies on me. I don't know what I'm doing wrong with this species of phytoplankton. If anyone is/has successful with this species of phytoplankton (Isocrysis), can you please list the parameters that you use to culture. I don't know if I'm using too little or too much Miracle Grow, if it's too hot or too cold, and/or if the salinity is off. Rather then me list my parameters, I would rather just know what the parameters are of someone who is successful at culturing this species and duplicate them.

 

[funkejj]

We have iso cultures that started from FAF disks. Buy two disks as one always seems to crash on us.
We start the culture using 1.019 water and in a 20 ounce bottle. We add miracle grow liquid plant food 4 ml for starter. Add plankton from the disk like you would normally. Bubble it we usually keep between 5 to 10 bubbles a second. 16 hours a day of 6500k light and shake bottle every daily. At the 1 week mark we add 3 more ml of Miracle grow to the bottle. After the bottle colors up which has taken 2 weeks for us normally we take the bottle and add it to a 2 liter bottle and fill the bottle with water to get about 3/4 full. Add 5 ml of miracle grow and let it bubble for another week. Add more water to fill the bottle up and add 5 more ml of Miracle grow. At this point we split after another wee since we have a good viable culture growing. From that point we now give our cultures 2 weeks of growth min before splitting or harvesting. We culture alot of food at our house. We currently have 6 strains of phyto going let me know if you have more issues.

 

[justmedanny]

Wow thank you so much for that info funkejj. I will give it one last try with the ISO. If you're willing to trade or sell growing cultures please let me know.

 

[funkejj]

I have never had a liquid live culture that we have purchased work out for me. We always start from non motile cultures. My only other concern is this time of year it is freezing here I am not sure it would survive transit even going over night.