Rotifers

[zeeter]

I'm getting rotifers today. Anyone have any ideas they can add to my plan?

Five gallon bucket
Air pump, hose, and airstone
Roti-feed
Spirulina (for enrichment - frozen until needed)
NO Phyto culture!
Heater
Water: 1.017 SG
Heat: 75 degrees

What else? I'm wondering how long until I need to split the culture, etc...

 

[reefstew]

Get rid of the airstone & use rigid tubing. Room temp should be good instead of a heater unless your keeping them elswere. A good place with culture info is rotifer .com

 

[GreshamH]

It depends on how dense you want your culture as to if you'll need the airstone or not. If your doing intense cultures I'd stick with an airstone.

 

[zeeter]

What difference does rigid tubing vs. an airstone is there? Any benefit to either one?

Unfortunately it's going to be within a couple of feet of an AC vent, so I'll have to use a heater.

 

[duncaholic]

What difference does rigid tubing vs. an airstone is there? Any benefit to either one?

Unfortunately it's going to be within a couple of feet of an AC vent, so I'll have to use a heater.

an airstone moves the water much more efficiently than rigid tubing. I always use one as it keeps the algae paste circulating well. two drawbacks though, 1st is that the stone itself can damage the rots if the flow is too high, 2nd is that the smaller bubbles have a similar effect to a protein skimmer. if you have too much flow and are creating any foam on the top of the water you will see a ring form around the inside of your bucket. This is from rotifers and algae being trapped by the bubbles and deposited around the surface edge. If you have evr ordered rots from reeds, they suggest using an airstone and it has always worked well for me.

I really wouldn't use a heater. Unless you expect the temp of your culture to fall below 68F. warmer rot cultures grow faster and die quicker. Live fast and die young!! I keep mine right under an AC vent and they fluctuate in temp during the day/night as I have a programmable thermostat set for 78F during the day and 76F at night. Unfortuanatley I find I have to re-start a new culture about every 2 weeks as a result. When I kept my house at 70F during the winter, I could keep a culture going for about 2 months.

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I made this video a while back, and the only thing I've changed is to remove the heaters. Also I've found they grow best at 17ppt, but once the cultures is kicking really strong, they have no problem thriving at 25 - 30ppt. probably the most important thing is to not overfeed. Also I personally would not dump the water they come in into your culture bucket. I would run them gently through 35um sieve and add them to freshly mixed(circulated for at least 24 hours) saltwater after their temp has stabilized.

good luck
-M

 

[zeeter]

That's a good idea, and since they didn't deliver today I can get some water ready to go now. I'll heat it up and then turn the heater off to see what the temperature is tomorrow morning.

I understand now about the bubbles, or having too powerful of a bubble flow. Perhaps if I ran two air stones in there I could get some good air quality without having too much power in them. Sound like a good idea?

Oh - one last thing. Do you folks keep cultures in a 5-gal bucket or a tank? I have an extra tank lying around that I can clean out.

 

[duncaholic]

5g buckets are easy and effective. You don't need 2 airstones, rots don't require much gas exchange.

 

[zeeter]

Cool. Thanks everyone. I think I know now why my last culture died. Too much flow.

 

[GreshamH]

The myth of airstones hurting rotifers needs to be dispelled right now as its simply not true even though it's been repeated as a mantra for over a decade. If I can get one of our tech's to take some video I will, but given the room is bio-secure, I'm not allowed in it (only those that need to work in there go in there).

Our cultures run at a full boil using both large disc diffusers (massive airstones). Our egg count is very stable and the same we have seen with using lower flow and larger bubbles. We have not had a crash in over a decade. There should be no reason you have to reset a rotifer culture every 14 days.

Rots are sensitive to low DO (dissolved oxygen) which is why you want to boil them (not for Co2 removal). The amount air flow correlates with the density of your culture(s) but there definitley is a bottom end. We run about 5K per ML, sometimes greater, so not only do we boil the culture with air, we pump in pure 02.

But we're producing billions a day and need for our systems to be utterly reliable. When hatcheries around the world count on you for your rotifers, you have to take it serious.

 

[duncaholic]

great info gresham!! I think my cultures crash after a while due to water quality. Does that sound right? If so, can I add some crushed coral and get some biological filtration going? Thanks in advance

 

[zeeter]

So we're saying HEAVY on the air bubbles, Gresham?

I purchased some Amquel and pH+ that was intended for my fry tanks, but would they be of good use in a rotifer culture?

 

[shadylane]

duncaholic

How big was your starter and how long has your set up been growing??

I cant beleive how many rots you have got in one cupful - i wish mine would grow that well.

 

[zeeter]

I think they're all dead. I put them in yesterday and the water was green; didn't have a sieve to put them into the clear water. This morning the water was still green, but I knew I wouldn't be home until late tonight so I put in 1/16th of a teaspoon of food and when I got home it was just as green as it was when I left this morning.

 

[duncaholic]

duncaholic

How big was your starter and how long has your set up been growing??

I cant beleive how many rots you have got in one cupful - i wish mine would grow that well.

I generally keep at least 2 buckets going at any givin time. When I go to start a new bucket, I take about 3 scoops with my 53um sieve out of one of the cultures and add it to the new water. As for a count on how many that is, I'm not sure, but after they are in the new culture, they count out at about 2-3 per ml. I feed roti-grow plus exclusively. I barely tint the water for the first 3-4 days, and will not add any more algae paste until the water is clear...totally clear. Within a week or two, the new culture will be up to +/- 20 per ml. At that point I try to remember to harvest a nice couple of scoops every day, and I only add algae once each night. Not saying this is a good idea, but I let my cultures get soooo clear, that it always amazes me they even survive. I built a small device for viewing 5ml of water at a time, and I can tell you that my cultures get so starved for food that the rots are opaque looking. Then a few hours after feeding they green up again. As for how long, I've been growing rots for maybe like 8 months. I did totally crash the entire set-up once, but that's because I got cheap, and tried to refridgerate a sandwich bag full of super concentrated rots, and dumped the rest. This generally will work ok if you only keep them in the fridge for 5-6 days, but I left them a little too long, or shocked them somehow when I tried to re-start the culture.

For me, ideal culture growth occurs at:

17ppm
68F-74F
airstone with good movement, just short of creating a lingering foam on the surface
sparse feedings (if they haven't consumed it in 24 hours, then that's waaay to much for for my taste)
regular harvests (when your culture gets thick, this is crucial)

Hope that helps

-Mitch

 

[reefstew]

I have always went with low flow & rigid tubing & have not crashed a culture in over 5 years. The reason it crashed is because I was breding a lot of fish & was making & selling a coral food. I just took to much for it to recover. Since I switched from live algae to roto-grow + & from 20 gal glass tanks to 5 gal buckets I have more than I need. But I will try an airstone & boil the water in 1 of my 8 5 gal buckets. If Gresham said this is best then I will try it. ( He does this for a living.)

 

[billsreef]

Our cultures run at a full boil using both large disc diffusers (massive airstones). Our egg count is very stable and the same we have seen with using lower flow and larger bubbles. We have not had a crash in over a decade. There should be no reason you have to reset a rotifer culture every 14 days.

Interesting. This runs counter to every culture manual I've ever seen, but I've also seen other bits of "conventional wisdom" proven wrong in the past. I'll have to give it whirl in one my cultures.

 

[reefstew]

Interesting. This runs counter to every culture manual I've ever seen, but I've also seen other bits of "conventional wisdom" proven wrong in the past. I'll have to give it whirl in one my cultures.

I'm with you Bill, but I changed 1 bucket to airstone & boil. I lt you know what happens next week.

 

[billsreef]

Had an interesting thought last night. One of those, the answers been in front of my face many time "duh" sort of moments. Any time I've had to pull a batch of eggs early and incubate in a hatching tank, I've also gone ahead and inoculated the tank with rots to get a jump on food being in the tank when the eggs hatch. Naturally, there's strong aeration for incubating the eggs. Despite that aeration, or perhaps because of it, there has always been a strong rot population by the time of the hatch.

 

[zeeter]

So I said last week that all of my new rotifers were dead. The water had been green for three days without me feeding, other than on the first day. Well, on Sunday night I noticed that the water was nearly clear! I vacuumed out the bottom to get some debris and added 1/8th tablespoon of rotifer food stirred into some water and when I got home yesterday the water was clear again. I started a new culture and used a sieve to move some in there, then added some food to that plus leveling off the buckets. The second culture is definitely clearer than it was after I put the food in.

 

[GreshamH]

sorry for the lack of replies. We're getting ready to launch an entire new product line as well as some existing products in new sizes (more on this one soon, you hobbyist breeders will be very happy) and I am doing much of it K-Solo so my time is spread very thin. I'll read the the comments over in the morning and respond.