Rotifers

[scottfarcuz]

After reading a lot of posts about it over the years I started recently culturing rotifers to feed my coral. Has anyone locally done this long term? Seems like you can grow a ton of live food without much time, or cost compared to alternatives. I'm just curious if SPS love them as much as I've seen people claim. I also don't know how much I should be feeding.

I've done pods in the past also which were pretty simple, but the growth rate on these guys seems insane so far. Why arent more people doing this? Is it just time factor? Anyone have culturing, feeding, or gut loading suggestions?

 

[CleveYank]

zero sum here

zero sum here

Personally, I'd love to setup plankton and brine and rotifer cultures for feeding.

Until I have dedicated fish room, it's more of a pain and more of a crunch and space and another thing to fiddle with than anything else. And I need another thing to fiddle with like I need another hole in my head. How would I find the time to enter obscure entries to leave myself open to public ridicule and infamy?

So if S = space and T = Time and F = (no not that F) Fiddle And H = Another Hole in Head
And S Val = -2 and T Val = -9 and F Val = 0 and H Val = -10

Then the Equation would look like

S + T/F(H)=0 (insert hoaky put on laugh here)


yeah yeah yeah I did watch too much Big Chuck when I was a lad.

 

[MJAnderson]

I looked into it but there was too much daily interaction (top-off this, shake that, add food) that I knew it would crash my first 3 day weekend out of town.

 

[scottfarcuz]

Yeah... I'm curious to see how it works long term just with trying to keep the culture going. Im just batch culturing about a liter a day now then refilling whats left in the bottle with fresh SW and some phyto. I was going to start a second batch, and rotate them every other day, but for now I dont see a reason. If I lose the whole culture I'll just pickup more at sc next time.

I did briefly try phyto a few years ago, and it does seem easy I just wasn't comfortable with feeding it, and possibly the fertilizer to my tank . Based on articles it seems to me cultures get contaminated too easy, and most people unknowingly end up with green water bacteria rather than phyto. Even when I was doing several tanks with copepods I bought all my phyto.

Some info online about people doing pods, and rotifers in the same culture. I'm thinking about giving that a try soon. Might put some time into trying to automate as much of it as possible on the cheap this winter.

 

[CleveYank]

I recall a fellow reefer

I recall a fellow reefer

I'm sorry I cannot provide you with hard links and such. But I do recall someone in reefcentral who had a 4 stage setup of airlines with incandescent bulbs on painters lights (funny silver Al types with spring clamps) who was making his own phyto in 2 liter bottles with air line tubing in them and he was harvesting them and had a schedule and it was as he stated as easy as circulating batches. He also had a couple 5 or 10 gallon tanks he was using for roti's. Don't quote me here but somehow I thought he was using potatoes to feed the roti's. Again, it was a happen chance thing I landed on so don't quote me. But I think I got there via one of the reefcentral TOTM's. If you have search capabilty fire it up. There was a link to photos and full explanation of what he did, what it took and how long etc.


2 liter phyto growing
grow your own phyto
greenwater plankton

do a search along those lines

 

[scottfarcuz]

Hmmm... I know Martin Moe did some articles on feeding roti's v-8 juice. Maybe thats what you were thinking?

If I stick with feeding them phyto I'm going to just keep buying it. I'd like to find a live bottled monoculture, I think reed carries a product just for this. Using DT's now, and I think one of the several strains is too big for them. Really just a guess.

 

[scottfarcuz]

If other people are looking for live food articles, and can't search either there is a sticky in the fish breeding forum with a really good series on microfood cultures...

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=135137

 

[CleveYank]

no it wasn't moe.


Wish I could remember or find it.

Growing schedule and everything was as easy as look ma no hands.

oh well. Sorry...guess I got nothin. Or in the queen's English.
Sorry old Chap, I'm afraid I cannot be of more assistance.