psimitry
New member
So I read Dwayne Sapp's article on culturing pods not too long ago. Since I have an intense desire to keep a mandarin dragonette, I wanted to make sure that my tank had an intensely concentrated pod population (I had a TON of them in my 18G but when I moved to my 55G I hardly ever saw them).
I've got about 75LB of rock in my tank so I have the rock qualification taken care of, but I wanted to culture some pods so that everything would be "copesetic" (har har).
So I got myself a 10G tank, partitioned it so that I could run redundant cultures, got an air pump with a gang valve so that I could reduce the flow and just have a gentle current in the tank.
I added my phytoplankton (phyto-feast), and a bottle of pods (tigger-pods), and away they went.
After a few days, VOILA! I could see a noticable increase in the population in there. But the water started getting clear (a good thing as I took it - it meant that the phyto was being consumed).
So I added some more phyto...
and my fortunes started going down from there.
I don't know why but instead of a further increase in pod population, they started going down.
A few days later, and there's hardly anything left.
SO. I am trying to figure out what I did wrong. I am told that phyto-feast might have been part of the problem. That I should have used DT's from the beginning and that phyto-feast because it supposedly has alcohol in it may have been my problem.
Possibility #2 - increase in salinity due to evaporating water. Though I do keep a tight lid on the tank, there has undoubtedly been some evaporation.
Possibility #3 - Water change - does one do this when culturing pods??
Possibility #4 - A combination of all three. Since I don't REALLY know what I am doing, I'm counting on losing a few cultures.
Anyone have any advice?
I've got about 75LB of rock in my tank so I have the rock qualification taken care of, but I wanted to culture some pods so that everything would be "copesetic" (har har).
So I got myself a 10G tank, partitioned it so that I could run redundant cultures, got an air pump with a gang valve so that I could reduce the flow and just have a gentle current in the tank.
I added my phytoplankton (phyto-feast), and a bottle of pods (tigger-pods), and away they went.
After a few days, VOILA! I could see a noticable increase in the population in there. But the water started getting clear (a good thing as I took it - it meant that the phyto was being consumed).
So I added some more phyto...
and my fortunes started going down from there.
I don't know why but instead of a further increase in pod population, they started going down.
A few days later, and there's hardly anything left.
SO. I am trying to figure out what I did wrong. I am told that phyto-feast might have been part of the problem. That I should have used DT's from the beginning and that phyto-feast because it supposedly has alcohol in it may have been my problem.
Possibility #2 - increase in salinity due to evaporating water. Though I do keep a tight lid on the tank, there has undoubtedly been some evaporation.
Possibility #3 - Water change - does one do this when culturing pods??
Possibility #4 - A combination of all three. Since I don't REALLY know what I am doing, I'm counting on losing a few cultures.
Anyone have any advice?