I wanted to bring everybody up to date on what I have been doing. I became exhausted feeding these guys multiple times daily; having done this for years now, with limited results, I was getting discouraged.
I have begun to experiment with recycling in closed systems. I am using a high flow tank without a substrate or skimmer for the invertebrates, and a very slow flow sand bed tank for the nutrient recycling. This sand bed is intensely illuminated with T5 lighting 24 hours to keep the oxygen up. I also am adding silica sand or liquid silica to keep a slight diatom bloom in this tank. To the slow flow area I am adding thumbnail-sized pieces of Wonderbread. (I have used lots of other carbon sources with less success).
This very slow flow tank produces a very large amount of weakly motile infusoria. At this point, I have a dense cloud of ciliated protozoa that hugs the bottom. If the lights are turned out, they ascend into the water column at night, presumably as the oxygen falls.
This slow flow tank has plenty of diatoms and soft-bodied zooplankton. I think this is the way to go- no skimmer, an extremely slow flow intensely lit refugium, and controlled stimulation of microorganism blooms.
The white bread appears to be especially useful in this regard. The slow flow allows a very high local concentration of nutrients around the bread pieces, and you get these very nice explosions of microorganisms around them.
With a continuous bloom of diatoms on the front glass, as long as the overflow is extremely slow, scraping the diatoms daily allows them to remain suspended in the tank. The lack of a substrate I think helps prevent competitive feeding.
One other thing- regarding water flow. It seems to me, after watching these things for years, that dendros do best near the intake to a pump- or near the overflow. I don't think they like turbulence. So a very inexpensive setup would be to have a single specimen suspended near a pump intake.
I'm working on this sort of thing now.
