Up against the wall with rots

David M

David M

New member
Ok I am now at the point where rotifers are my limiting factor. I can produce far more larvae than I can feed. Can we get a thread going here on intense rotifer production? Or if it's already here can someone point me to it? Thanks, this really sucks. I have to pass on two nests this week because I can't feed them.
 
Three words: Harvest half daily.

Best advice I ever got. Gets rid of the dead and old ones, and enriches for the young reproducing ones. Also keeps the water nice. Start with a small volume of rots. Harvest half daily for 3 or 4 days and then you can expand the volume (doubling it, daily) for 3 or 4 days before doing the halfsies harvest thing again.

For example. Your fish just laid eggs. You start with 1/2 gallon of 150 rots per ml. Throw away 1/4 gallon of it each day and replace the water with matching salinity and temp fresh saltwater. On day 4, just add a 1/2 gallon of replacement water. Now you have 1 gallon. Next day, add another gallon replacement water. Next day, add 2 gallons replacement water. Feed all this time, 2x per day with just enough phyto to keep it slightly green and cloudy. Now it is day 7, you have 4 gallons of 150 rots per ml and your eggs have not hatched yet. You could add more water, and expand the volume, or harvest some, if you have more than enough, to keep the culture young.

Always aerate gently. Keep temp something suitable. In summer I do not heat. In winter it is too cold in my basement, so I heat gently.

Good luck and keep us informed as to what works for you.

Cheers,
Kathy
 
When I am using them I do harvest 1/4 to half daily, they don't recover quickly enough and over a period of several days decline to a point where I have to stop for a few days. As their "schedule" does not always coincide with the breeding cycles I get into trouble, like right now :(

Richard I sent you mail, I am serious. This worth $$$$$ to me :D
 
1) Use IA, drip it thru out the day/night

2) Keep temp at 78Ã"šÃ‚°F

3) Keep SG at 1.012

4) Do a 100% water change about once a week, maybe a little longer like a week and a half.

5) Learn the population balance of your culture. Harvesting too much or too little will result in a slowed production rate. It is something that will vary from culture to culture.

6) Lots of O2 in the water.
 
I'd do what JHardman suggested, but, I'd do either a continual flow thru (10%-20% daily) or do a 50% daily. I'd also keep you SG a bit higher and drip Chloramx, inject O2 and use rotifer filter floss. That's what we do in a nutshell, 1/2 billion rotifers daily don't lie :D
 
How do you set up a continuous flow? What I mean is what sized mesh would I use to hold the rots and how quickly would it get clogged up? This is what I had in mind; a tank with overflow to a sump with massive bio filtration and a skimmer. From there to a header tank with adjustable feed to the culture tank and overflow back to sump for excess water. Then drip IA into the culture tank and hope to find a rate where it gets consumed faster than it can go to the sump. Am I dreaming? I gues what I need to know is how big a "baby" rotifer is. I have the PCM, I will have a look at it again. I can envision the whole thing but just can't figure the mesh size and square area required. I'd think keeping the screen clear would be the biggest problem.
 
I saw a set up somewhere with a drum filter that rotated as it filtered out the old water, keeping the rots inside. Water flowed into and out of the drum, and because it turned, the screen did not get clogged. I think there was a spray that rinsed it continually. Very complicated, but it was supposed to work, and i think they were marketing it.
 
setup a small pump(parastolic) to provide filtered water, an ammonia nutrilizer and algae to your culture 24/7, either remove the volume that is added every day, or setup an overflow, if you setup an overflow and you desire to keep the rotifers in the culture 52 micron if you dont want to save the rots in the culture dont use a screen, put the overflow into a collection chamber which you will collect from.

the drum filter is a reed product which is at http://www.reed-mariculture.com/rotifer/icrs/index.asp
its not really complicated, but it is more complex than a bucket and an airstone. they are not that expensive or difficult to build. the bigger advantage is that it filteres the water and allows you to do a 3x per hour turnover which is much higher than you will get with anything else for our sizes.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7121399#post7121399 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by rsman
setup a small pump(parastolic) to provide filtered water, an ammonia nutrilizer and algae to your culture 24/7, either remove the volume that is added every day, or setup an overflow, if you setup an overflow and you desire to keep the rotifers in the culture 52 micron if you dont want to save the rots in the culture dont use a screen, put the overflow into a collection chamber which you will collect from.

the drum filter is a reed product which is at http://www.reed-mariculture.com/rotifer/icrs/index.asp
its not really complicated, but it is more complex than a bucket and an airstone. they are not that expensive or difficult to build. the bigger advantage is that it filteres the water and allows you to do a 3x per hour turnover which is much higher than you will get with anything else for our sizes.
Click to expand...

We developed a rotating drum filer, but it is not one of our products. FWIW, we dropped using that method a while ago. We now simply use a 45 micron standpipe and clean it daily. Less moving parts :D

You can use anywhere between 40 -55 micron for the flow thru. It all really depends on what maintance you want to do. Smaller micron means you have to clean it sooner.

We clean ours every day, prior to our daily rotifer and egg count.

You can always google rofiter and you'll find the pages the UA says I can't post as a sponsor (hint hint :D)
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7114276#post7114276 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by rsman
there are treads on this, also there is a cool filter

http://www.reed-mariculture.com/rotifer/icrs/index.asp

somewhere around there.
Click to expand...

If the link does not lead to any pictures of the syatems ICRS & ICRS2 as it does actually from my PC, I have them both DL for some time and can attach if interested and, of course, if approved by Randy R.

Matt
 
With my culture, when I know I'm going to need a lot I harvest 40-50% daily and tint the water heavily With IA, as my need dissipates I slow down on the feeding then the replacement/harvest volume.
 
Thanks everyone, I will try a few of these ideas. I am letting perfectly good nests go simply because I can't feed the larvae, it's just stupid.
 
loco?

loco?

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7136928#post7136928 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by David M
Thanks everyone, I will try a few of these ideas. I am letting perfectly good nests go simply because I can't feed the larvae, it's just stupid.
Click to expand...

As crazy as it sounds, you should be pulling the nests anyway and then co-culturing. I've found that for the first couple of days rotifer densities have INCREASED in the hatch tank while they learned to hunt them. Better some than none
 
As crazy as it sounds, you should be pulling the nests anyway and then co-culturing. I've found that for the first couple of days rotifer densities have INCREASED in the hatch tank while they learned to hunt them. Better some than none
Click to expand...

That used to work, but all my pairs have matured to where the nests are huge now, they wipe out the rotifers in a matter of hours. The only hope I'd have is to trash most of the hatch & just set up 200 or so. The tomato's usually take more than one night to fully hatch so they make it easy, just work with the first night's hatch and toss the rest of the nest. Also they take 9 days to incubate and are so large at hatching some of them can take nhbs the first day. Maybe not the best idea even if they eat them, but it's better than nothing. The maroons hatch out around 2000 all at once. I have close to 200 oc's at 9 days now, about twice as many as I ever had at this age. Two more hatches will go off tonight. Oh and the dottybacks every 6-7 days, and man can those guys eat rotifers :D So I'm pretty screwed if I can't get the density up soon.
 
Here's another thing you could try, as you're doing the 50% harvests, bump up the temperature. I don't suggest doing this long term as it can make your culture unstable, it can significantly increase production.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7143227#post7143227 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by David M
Yes John :rolleyes: I figured that one out all on my own :D
Click to expand...

Sorry David. :p

So what have you done and what are the results?
 
Results suck! ( oops, can I say that here?) I split my cultures and doubled them. Toped each "new" one off with new sw and Ro mixed to 1.014 ( wich they were already at). Added air. Did 25% harvest/ water change every 12 hours. Went a tad heavier than normal on the IA. No significant improvement so far. I now have twice as many gallons of culture to maintain but the same number of rots. :mad2:
 
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