Sustaining good plankton levels.

[MARINECRITTERS]

Anyone wan't to tell me how to get photos up.

 

[Hermannsae]

Did you try photo bucket?

http://beta.photobucket.com/?home_ab=true

 

[MARINECRITTERS]

Lets give this another try

[/IMG]

http://i1078.photobucket.com/albums/w481/MARINECRITTERS/ats4_zps886d4992.png

 

[MARINECRITTERS]

Just wanted to tell you guys that running a bio pellet reactor without a skimmer on a nps tank is actually quite beneficial, the bio film it releases converts into bacterioplankton which intern feeds certain corals, zooplankton and many other animals that we strive for in non photosynthetic reefs. Also an update on the ATS, so far it has been doing a charm but it would really easily get clogged which kept the ato from working correctly, I fixed this by putting a thin piece of smooth plastic ( smooth so algae can't attach ) about 3" tall ontop of the algae screen, this keeps it from clogging.
Also I got a new idea!, I have recently put a deepish sand bed in my ats box and I have noticed an amazing amount of life in the sand, my idea is to setup a pump that stirs up the sand every week or so. By doing this many creatures will be brought into the water column so corals and other filter feeders can feed on them.

P.s I might put up a video of my tank at night to show you the abundant amount of life. Worm epitokes, shrimp, paddleworms and other strange creatures. I also saw my clove polyp colony release eggs into the water the other night, neat huh?

 

[herring_fish]

I am working on a rather elaborate system for growing plankton in the garage. The problem is that I have no time during the week so finishing it is ridiculously slow. I will come back to how it woks it at the end of this post. I hope to get the first part of it running again next week...after a year and a half. I ordered a gallon of a very dense culture of rotifers and it should be here soon.

I hope to also grow brine shrimp. I raised them, several years ago, in a 55 gallon tank. I fed them a brown powdered food and they loved it. Most of it would settle to the sandy bottom and they would swoop down to snag a bight and loop back for more later. I added fresh eggs regularly and didn't worry about the age when I harvested. I would run the screen through the water and I grab 5 or 10% per day but in a 55 gallon tank, that was a good amount.

MarineCritters mentioned that some people have reported having success by adding shrimp, squid, clam, etc juice. I am wondering if others have done this or know where to read up on someone else's experiences? I opened a thread but got little response. I am a long time user of a 2 gallon dump bucket style Algal Turf Scrubber that is about the tank and hope that I will not have a nutrient problem. I use carbon but I don't force the water through it. I don't want any kind of mechanical filter in line. I put it in a sock in the dump tray.

Back to the mini plankton farm in the garage. I have one clear tube that is 6 inches in diameter and 6 feet tall. It has a funnel at the bottom so that the waste doesn't settle there. I hope to add 5 or more of these plankton towers. They are designed to go along the wall so that I can still use the garage for cars.

The tubes are fed water from the main tank and liquid phyto with peristaltic pumps and gravity brings the water and plankton back to the main display tank. One tube works quite well so I built a 2 axis robot to move the feeding tube to the plankton towers. I didn't want to use solenoids for a lot of reasons that I won't go into but half way through making the robot, I found an automated six way liquid switch. It is pricy but it makes the robot obsolete. I continued with it just for the fun of it.

Each tower can hold 8 gallons but 7 works best to hold the gravity fed water level at the right height. with automatic feeding, I hope to get good densities. In the single tower, I cycled 2 gallons from the display tank, through the tower and back each day but I could go up to 3 and a half. With six towers, I should have a nice plankton level in the tank with six potentially different varieties of animals.

Again, I am better at designing, an experimenting than finishing and polishing projects but this looks like a thread for dreamers and experimenters so I thought that I would chime in.

 

[MARINECRITTERS]

I am working on a rather elaborate system for growing plankton in the garage. The problem is that I have no time during the week so finishing it is ridiculously slow. I will come back to how it woks it at the end of this post. I hope to get the first part of it running again next week...after a year and a half. I ordered a gallon of a very dense culture of rotifers and it should be here soon.

I hope to also grow brine shrimp. I raised them, several years ago, in a 55 gallon tank. I fed them a brown powdered food and they loved it. Most of it would settle to the sandy bottom and they would swoop down to snag a bight and loop back for more later. I added fresh eggs regularly and didn't worry about the age when I harvested. I would run the screen through the water and I grab 5 or 10% per day but in a 55 gallon tank, that was a good amount.

MarineCritters mentioned that some people have reported having success by adding shrimp, squid, clam, etc juice. I am wondering if others have done this or know where to read up on someone else's experiences? I opened a thread but got little response. I am a long time user of a 2 gallon dump bucket style Algal Turf Scrubber that is about the tank and hope that I will not have a nutrient problem. I use carbon but I don't force the water through it. I don't want any kind of mechanical filter in line. I put it in a sock in the dump tray.

Back to the mini plankton farm in the garage. I have one clear tube that is 6 inches in diameter and 6 feet tall. It has a funnel at the bottom so that the waste doesn't settle there. I hope to add 5 or more of these plankton towers. They are designed to go along the wall so that I can still use the garage for cars.

The tubes are fed water from the main tank and liquid phyto with peristaltic pumps and gravity brings the water and plankton back to the main display tank. One tube works quite well so I built a 2 axis robot to move the feeding tube to the plankton towers. I didn't want to use solenoids for a lot of reasons that I won't go into but half way through making the robot, I found an automated six way liquid switch. It is pricy but it makes the robot obsolete. I continued with it just for the fun of it.

Each tower can hold 8 gallons but 7 works best to hold the gravity fed water level at the right height. with automatic feeding, I hope to get good densities. In the single tower, I cycled 2 gallons from the display tank, through the tower and back each day but I could go up to 3 and a half. With six towers, I should have a nice plankton level in the tank with six potentially different varieties of animals.

Again, I am better at designing, an experimenting than finishing and polishing projects but this looks like a thread for dreamers and experimenters so I thought that I would chime in.

Great idea, the only thing that seems hard to sustain is the levels of rotifers in the towers. Since the water gets circulated through them how will you make sure that the whole entire population does not get removed, maybe if you have a fine filter in the drains to keep the rotifers in the towers and then you remove them every couple days or so. Will you also culture phytoplankton?

 

[MARINECRITTERS]

Some more pics

http://i1078.photobucket.com/albums/w481/MARINECRITTERS/IMG_926
[IMG]http://i1078.photobucket.com/albums/w481/MARINECRITTERS/IMG_9264_zps28d18991.jpg

 

[herring_fish]

I buy the phyto from Reeds. The population multiplies so that you can extract 1/3 to 1/2 per day. Therefore, you don't have to strain it out. I pump in 2 to 3 gallons per day in total, spread out into 8 to 10 feedings throughout the day and night. The population rebuilds itself as it goes. I ran a test that worked great for 4 months of steady output.

 

[MARINECRITTERS]

I buy the phyto from Reeds. The population multiplies so that you can extract 1/3 to 1/2 per day. Therefore, you don't have to strain it out. I pump in 2 to 3 gallons per day in total, spread out into 8 to 10 feedings throughout the day and night. The population rebuilds itself as it goes. I ran a test that worked great for 4 months of steady output.

Seems very interesting, would you mind posting some pictures of your plankton towers so far?

 

[herring_fish]

This was the start of the first test. I found that aeration is very important as you get higher densities. My original pump wouldn't force air to the bottom. It needed more head pressure so to speak. My next bigger one did the job for a while but the diaphragm was under additional stress so it died in four months. I switch to the other side of the dual outlet unit and thought that I would get another four months but it lasted only two more weeks. That is why the experiment ended. I decided that I wasn't going to limp through pumps so I bought an old style pump that is getting popular again.

I had been told that a low slight bubbling rate was good for rotifers and that is true but as the density gets higher, particularly in a deeper tower, you need more oxygen. In a wide flat container, the rots can hang out closer to the top where oxygen levels are higher. I was also told that lots of bubbles might get between body parts and kill rotifers. Of course, what I hear and what they actually say might be two different things but I asked Reeds and they said that might be true of other bigger animals but not rotifers. Therefore, I ran my tower at a strong boil. They loved it.

I fed very lightly. That is the only hard part at the beginning. Once I found the right amount, I used a syringe to administer the same amount, morning and night. With a peristaltic pump and controller, feeding throughout the day, the density can get much higher with perhaps less food. They thought that, with automation, I might only need one tower for what I was trying to do.

Of course I will have to find that tipping point all over again. Also, of course other products from other companies work great as well. That is just who I ended up with. Reed has new products that are suppose to combat ammonia and pH fluctuations so that you can feed close to all that you want. I bought some but haven't tested that idea out yet.

I would grow my own live phyto but maintenance, the cleaning of so many parts and constant possibilities of crashes do not fit well with my personality. I could use yeast and/or other things but the liquid is a constant that I can deal with, automate and get better nutritious value of the final product.

 

[MARINECRITTERS]

Very cool, can't wait to see the finished product.


For those of you with nps tanks watching this thread, feel free to post pictures of your system.

 

[MARINECRITTERS]

I am starting to dose potassium to my aquarium as it is very important to various bacterias present in the aquarium, this healthy bacteria population will feed certain zooplankton which will then feed some of the filter feeders in the system. Just wanted to hear your thoughts about what I had mentioned earlier, setting a pump up in the scrubber tank to stir up the top of the deep sand bed ( just enough to bring detrius and whatnot into the water column ) this will act like a marine snow type of thing. I would let the pump go on every week or so. I will have the bio pellets at high flow so they remove more nitrate.

 

[GreshamH]

The main reason I stopped is that there is a harmful bacteria that forms in the container from the eggs.

Simply using decapped cysts will eliminate nearly all traces of vibrio.

I hallways wanted to do the brine shrimp thing sounds worth it. They have a hatcher you can put in a tank it would fit in my fuge perfectly and they also sell the eggs I am going to get it and give a try hallways wanted to.that is still feeding you're tank and causing some bioload.allot of the public aquariums by me are next to the ocean and have pipes running constant fresh salt allot in California do that too.

CAS (Steinhart) mixes their own water and does not use NSW. CAS uses decaps and only feeds NHBBS so for them, there is no need to enrich.

 

[MARINECRITTERS]

I am now thinking about adding phytoplankton to my system, it turns out that a lot of azoox corals have something called pinnula around their polyps, this not only increases surface are but allow the coral to filter out extremely small particles, the corals do filter out detritus but it is very low in nutritional value so phytoplankton is very important to their diets. I do believe my ats adds a small amount of free floating algae ( phytoplankton ) but I should also feed phytoplankton to my system with a dosing pump. I also found that lots of azoox corals are not very good at capturing zooplankton, so now that I am going to start dosing phytoplankton I did some research, it turns out that the chlorophyll is very important to azoox corals, what do you guys think about dosing liquid chlorophyll to our systems?

 

[herring_fish]

I buy phyto and feed it too my tank daily and will soon dose it regularly throughout the day and night as my rotifers come on line. I don't have much variety of NPS coral in the tank right now. A friend of mine has come to the conclusion that dendronephthya coral mostly like on phyto. No the dendros that are large polyps but the ones that inflate. He may be wrong. I find that sun corals don't seem to care about it. I could be wrong.

On the other hand, I am growing scores of small sponges of various colors. They started spontaneously, apparently starting from spores, I guess. I turned over a rock this weekend and it was partially covered in white, yellow and blue sponges. I put it the dimmer part of the tank, bottom side up because it looked great.

Elsewhere, on the top side of the rock, I have a few small blue ones that look like they will build tubes, some blue and purple incrusting sponges, yellow, tan and white ball sponges, along with orange and red, very thin encrusting sponges.

When I ran out of the phyto, they turned dark and started to die out. When I got more and started feeding again, they started to recover. I don't think that I can sustain good sized sponges that are collected from the sea with the doses that I am putting in the tank right now.

I am not sure that simply adding more phyto would do the trick. the sponges may be living on the bacterial that loves phyto instead of consuming the phyto directly so if I multiplied the dosing of phyto, there is no guarantee that I could grow the big ones.

My friend had success with a big sponge that started from scratch but he was dosing phyto and vodka so which one was it? Anyway, phyto is good for the tank.

 

[Wave Ace]

Im adding 1litre of phyto a day split in to two doses

 

[herring_fish]

How long have you been doing it and what results have you seen? Are you growing it your self?

 

[Wave Ace]

been adding phyto since adding corals to my 400 litre dedicated NPS tank plus FM foods and 5 mixed frozen cubes dosed over 22 hours per day

been having a slight PO4 problem so lowered dosing of phyto down to 200ml per day and some of the corals didnt like it

Yes I grow my own I use 5 2 litre pop bottles in a white salt bucket with a energy saving light in the middle of the lid

I remove 200ml from each bottle every morning and top up with new salt water + phyto food

lighting is from 6am till 10pm

 

[nicewicz]

I also dose phyto and culture three different species. I actually use this to add my freshly hatched bbs. I add about 300 mL per day of the three phyto species along with the bbs via dosing pump.

 

[MARINECRITTERS]

For all the beginners out there, here is a little guide I put together to help your understanding about non photosynthetic corals.
Non-photosynthetic coral care and info.

First off lets talk about coral in general, Corals are marine invertebrates belonging to the cnidaria phylum. Corals are colonial animals, which means a group of living things clumped together. There are two main types of corals, hard and soft. Hard corals excrete a calcium carbonate base while soft corals do not, although soft corals do use calcium in their sclerites, which helps keep the corals shape and structure.
Photosynthetic corals use a symbiotic algae called zooxanthelate to create the majority of their food. Zooxanthelate create food using the sun ( photosynthesis ) and all the left over food that the zooxanthelate don’t use goes to the coral, when corals lose the zooxanthelate this is called bleaching but that is a whole other story. Now this may seem like a pretty efficient way of gaining energy, the symbiotic algae gets a home and the coral gets food, great huh, but corals will benefit tremendously from filter feeding which means filtering/capturing particles out of the water column. This allows the coral to become healthier and larger.
Now that you understand coral life in general, let’s go deeper down in the ocean were the beautiful shimmering light slowly dissipates into nothing.
So non-photosynthetic corals thrive in areas were the amount of sunlight penetrating the water is not sufficient, but since there is no/not much light, how does the symbiotic photosynthetic algae survive, well simply it doesn’t. Since the coral cannot use photosynthesis it has to gain energy from something else. Plankton. So these corals rely only on filtering and capturing small particles or plankton out of the water. Azooxanthellate coral species which means non photosynthetic consume plankton species such as phytoplankton zooplankton and bacterioplankton, they also consume detritus (particulate organic matter) and dissolved nutrients (dissolved organic matter), the food they feed on all depends on the polyp surface area. Many people have thought that corals do not feed on phytoplankton because of how small it is, but coral polyps sometimes contain a feather like structure called pinnula. Since phytoplankton is on their diet, how important is it? Very important, the reason is because corals, which contain pinnula, filter out very small particles including detritus, Detritus is very abundant in the ocean it is always floating about in the water column. Marine snow, which is basically detritus and dying organic matter is very low in nutritional value, so with out nutrient rich phytoplankton non photosynthetic corals would not be thriving and the numbers would drop significantly, you may of heard of how iron sulfate was dumped into the ocean, well the idea behind that was to encourage phytoplankton growth with “ fertilizer “, I am not going to go deep into topic about this but I can say that I did not support it as there are so many side effects that could result in this. Now back on topic, not all non-photosynthetic corals rely on phytoplankton. For example a large polyp stony non-photosynthetic coral such as sun polyps feed on larger plankton such as mysid shrimp. To care for these beautiful corals it takes lots of work and dedication but it is well worth it. Since most of our aquarium are not directly attached to the ocean we to not have copious amounts of food for our corals, so we have to manually add it to the water while maintaining water quality. As of right now there are not many systems that can support large amounts of this sort of life but we are working on it ( some things we have done are automated food dosers, refugiums, algae turf scrubbers, etc ) hopefully someday we can have great success keeping these delicate creatures, which will not only amaze public but it will also allow us to understand our oceans better.