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  1. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    At 18c you should find that they are slower growing but live longer and become larger. I have a friend that cultures moina and we occasionally swap starters when a culture crashes or there's some other disaster like when I spilled my entire 15L culture all over a carpet floor. He keeps them...
  2. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    By the way if anyone is interested, after a lot of searching I've found a source of high quality ceriodaphnia dubia ephippia. A company called microbiotests in Belgium can supply them to pretty much anywhere in Europe and I can testify that they are comparable to moina in terms of productivity...
  3. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    Exactly as you say - If I'm not going to be culturing moina for a while I just let them produce ephippia by feeding way less. It's very easy to visually differentiate between an adult moina that's carrying embryos and one that's carrying ephippia and you can also see the shed ephippia on the...
  4. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    what's your setup like? are there plants and snails in there and what size of tank are you using? I found a video on youtube recently where someone was reporting that contrary to conventional wisdom they found that daphnia cultures without snails were slightly more productive.
  5. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I'm still experimenting and fine tuning. There's obviously got to be an optimum ratio of carrot to water that would produce the best results. There may be better vegetables to use too. It was someone in Asia who tipped me off to this and said that they start all their cultures this way, only...
  6. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    In theory the opposite is true and moina are supposed to be much more tolerant of poor water conditions than the common daphnia species but there's so many variables to account for in any comparison. I think it's probably easier to maintain a stable daphnia culture because they tend to reproduce...
  7. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    Here's a video of one of the carrot cultures. It's been about four and a half days since I added roughly 20 moina.
  8. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I've had plenty of copepods in most of my moina cultures as a consequence of using tank water for changes in the moina cultures but they don't seem to ever reach great numbers. I've never been able to culture freshwater copepods in large numbers but there are so many different species that it's...
  9. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    Interesting catching up on the results from people experimenting with this. I've begun experimenting with moina culture again and I'm pursuing some different angles that might be of interest. I was able to get good results with the chlorella but as has been noticed my protocol was fairly...
  10. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    Another weird thing about the ceriodaphnia is I have never even once found an intermediate sized ceriodaphnia. They all appear to be either fully adult size or babies smaller even than rotifers. I think that possibly the now huge accumulation of mulm and sort of algae reefs in this culture plays...
  11. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    Ceriodaphnia dubia culture is still going strong but it's incredibly frustrating that I can't figure out why it's doing so well now. I struggled to get these really producing for a long time but currently I harvest from this culture several times a day without apparently having any impact on the...
  12. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I tried growing it with Tropica specialized and miracle grow slow release pellets but without great results. It seemed to grow a bit but was a much more pale and never got to very high cell densities. What I'm doing at the moment is growing in strong fish mix which seems to result in an...
  13. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    They definitely can, it just may be that they reproduce faster on grains - or even just that grain flour is cheaper than algae wafers. I've only tried oat flour so far with the ones alex sent me. The few that I was able to extract from my vivariums drain I'm keeping the same way but have...
  14. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    That's exactly it - that just like infusorial snails they seem to convert solid foods into, and then pass in their waste, a lot of microorganisms that the moina can feed on. The most interesting thing about these worms to me has been that Alex pointed out there are huge numbers of free...
  15. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I think that your cooler temps might be playing a role in stability too @MirandaB, my culture never really gets above 22c and often dips down to around 18c or even cooler. What temperature are you running @Wookii? Hopefully this recent issue really was just some flukey bacterial infection that...
  16. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    It seems the most productive method by far is to keep them on slabs of fine filter sponge laying in water almost level with the top of the sponge. You feed finely powdered porridge oats and pour off and replace the dirty water every few days. The water absolutely stinks but alex says it contains...
  17. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    That must be increidbly frustrating but it seems like only contamination with some kind of harmful bacteria could explain that, even when I've had a culture crash before I don't think I've ever actually had ALL the moina die off, just a sharp reduction in numbers. I will try and get some more...
  18. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    There's two guys on ebay, one of them is shipping the worms from Denmark and the other is Alex the Russian guy I'm talking about. I was a test case to see how they would survive shipping and they seem to have survived just fine. If it's Alex you've ordered them from you wont be disappointed with...
  19. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    Got my microfex from the Russian guy Alex today so I've got another variable for the moina cultures to keep things nice and confusing now. He also confirmed that in addition to maintaining several specific cultures of them (that he apparently really does harvest 500g from a day) he also keeps...
  20. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    It's entirely possible that the ratio of nutrients in the fish mix is such that all of some necessary nutrient for the chlorella is used up before all of the ammonia is purged that's why I'm keen to be able to test mine but it wouldn't necessarily explain why me and miranda don't seem to be...
  21. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I'm going to don't worry. I can't say I've ever seen the snails do that, sometimes they have clustered near the surface right after a feed but that happened even with yeast. Soon I'll be able to let you know the ph of my culture and what results im getting ammonia wise.
  22. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    It's weird but this basically sounds like when people get cloudy water in their aquariums doesn't it? I've often seen threads where people can't work out what caused it and it keeps coming back after water changes only to eventually disappear as quickly as it started. The weird thing is that you...
  23. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I've only ever used 2L and 5L bottles of coop own brand still water. At first I even used the water as a base for the fert mix but now obviously I'm using tap water without any problems. I use an arcadia jungle dawn LED bar upright and aligned with the bottles now for maximum light and it's 34w...
  24. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I don't think that the sugars from the fishmix are strictly necessary, it just allows the chlorella to continue growing during the dark period and they are included with a view to promoting microbial growth around the root system of terrestrial plants more than for their value as a fertiliser...
  25. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I'm really interested in what results you can get with dry ferts because I genuinely can't tell whether it will produce better or worse results, seems like it could go either way, but if it simplifies things in any way you wont have to twist my arm to get me to switch over. There's a very...
  26. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    The moina in my main culture have actually now been overtaken by the ceriodaphnia, I think there may actually be hundreds of thousands of them in there and I'm literally throwing ceriodaphnia away each day to keep the population under control because my fish can't eat this much. It's frustrating...
  27. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I'm not sure about this, I don't have a link to hand right now but I found a study where they demonstrated that at least they have the ability to sort and preferentially consume or discard particles based on size. They fed them two types of algae with different average cell sizes but that they...
  28. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    @Wookii you were right about the agar, much better results. The gelatin batch turned into a sloppy disgusting mess when the room temperature spiked by a couple of degrees so I made some with agar today. Messed up the first one by trying to be smart and boiling a teaspoon of agar in 100ml of...
  29. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I was probably over reacting and the strong light was just causing the chlorella to bloom in the culture, I'm glad there were no signs of a crash. To be honest the disappearing layer of snail poo is really mysterious, I can't quite figure out what's going on there. Maybe the moina did eat it...
  30. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    One other possibility for the change in appearance of the chlorella by the way is just that it's adapting to the lower light levels in your moina tank and exploiting some other source of carbon in the water, or maybe even the snail poo to produce heterotrophic growth. In a purely heterotrophic...
  31. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I wouldn't wait until tomorrow. I'd do a big water change tonight if you can as this sounds a lot like a culture that's about to crash real bad. I think it's possible there was too much chlorella at once and after it used up all the nutrients present in the water -, as it began dying, some kind...
  32. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    The Ceriodaphnia are really starting to take off, these were tricky to get to this point but if anyone else wants a starter culture to experiment with just give me a shout. Being even smaller than moina they are really great for fry or tiny fish, my Boraras maculatus and scarlet badis love them...
  33. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    That's actually really good to know. I thought agar set too much at a higher temperature than that, THIS paper confirms that 40 degrees isn't a significantly fatal temperature for the chlorella. As long as the chitosan doesn't affect it setting I'm going to try switching to agar, I knew gelatin...
  34. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    also found this paper which noted that increased concentrations of dissolved organic matter rich in humic substances increased brood size in daphnia as well as a few other interesting observations. Living in a browning environment: Effects on Daphnia’s growth and fatty acid pattern
  35. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I'm not sure really, it's weird that it doesn't look more green but it could well be growing from potential nutrients in the tapwater, or maybe unconsumed nutrients left from the fish mix? I've never had a bacterial bloom in a moina or daphnia culture really, not of free floating bacteria anyway...
  36. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I'm still very curious what results you might get with your dry ferts and the chlorella too @Wookii, in an ideal world the fish mix could smell slightly better when you first start running air through it.
  37. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    That explains it, I had the window open 24/7 up here in Scotland. Probably much colder.
  38. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    This is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to see when I sent out these cultures. Please let us know how this works out, if you do get good growth of the chlorella in here you could try adding chicken manure with the moina to act as fertiliser for the chlorella and a source of various fungi...
  39. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    That's pretty fast! it took longer than that when I was doing them on the windowsill.
  40. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    As far as the clumping/settling goes it seems like if it's allowed to settle too much initially it takes longer to resolve itself. I'm using a cheap airpump from amazon that's not very powerful for the big 5L bottles so particularly when they're fresh I still give them a good shake once a day...
  41. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I was just about to ask how you were getting on, I'm very glad to see things are working out! Obviously the whole point is you don't have to worry quite as much about water quality as you do with yeast so I would just top it up whenever you notice it getting clearer. I often make the water...
  42. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    You know I actually forgot to ask, I'll find out. For grindal worms I don't think keeping them on sponge makes them any more productive, it's just to try and avoid soil mites and make it marginally easier to harvest them. I think the notion is that with the microfex the extra oxygen whilst...
  43. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    So I actually ended up chatting to this guy on the phone. He had some interesting things to say, he's from Russia, apparently these are the go to live food over there for breeding all kinds of fish. Supposedly they can be absurdly productive under the proper conditions, he mentioned sometimes...
  44. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    When it was in the plastic cup it was on the windowsill during the day but once I moved it into the tupperware I put it under the same 24hr LED as my master culture. Presumably when a culture that's been fed heavily with chlorella is exposed to a reasonable amount of light it will continue to...
  45. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    In my large master culture there is normally a bit of an accumulation in the centre of their shed exoskeletons and a few dead adults. In my experience if there's a lot of dead adults the culture is crashing, they don't tend to die faster than the ramshorns eat them otherwise. Don't know how I...
  46. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    Here's a fresh culture I started, container size is just under two litres, round and low, no aeration or heater. I added a few strands of hay, a fat ramshorn, and chlorella to a 32oz plastic cup until I couldn't see through the water anymore, and about 20 adult moina appoximately a week ago...
  47. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I'm holding off on buying the ebay ones from Denmark until I've asked around on here incase anyone has them. Seems like too much potential for brexovid shenanigans ordering from Denmark.
  48. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    Hard to get the lighting right to show you what I'm talking about but you can see here a little bit of sedimentation in the ridges of the bottles similar to what you're seeing in your own. There was more a few days ago but it quickly sorts itself out as the algal cells use up the fish mix. These...
  49. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    It could be something to do with minerals. I use water from my tank for all the water changes and it presumably had minerals present from the aquasoil, rooibos tea etc. There's something very wrong if you're getting a similar number of births and deaths with Moina though and it probably implies...
  50. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    What I find is that once it's a nice opaque emerald green, if you turn the airpump off and let the culture settle a bit, for some reason especially in tall bottles the top inch or so of water especially around the edges seems to clear. When there's still a lot of nutrients left from the fishmix...
  51. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    In an ideal world you'd find a way to shine the LED on the side of those containers too. I'm using an LED bar so I can stand it up upright next to the bottles and I've built a little box lined with tinfoil that goes around them. It's so much faster than when I had them on the windowsill, you can...
  52. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    Actually seems it's most likely a defense mechanism in response to some other bacteria present in the mix. Once the chlorella outcompetes it the growth returns to normal. This quote is obviously talking about plants but it's a general defense mechanism.
  53. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    This looks fine to me, I'm growing it in 2L and 5L bottles with ridged sides and it sort of does this in the ridges, especially at the start of the culure. If you have lids for those containers and can give them a shake that will help get it back into suspension. It should sort itself out though...
  54. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I'm so embarassed by my hand writing! Did the C. dubia survive the trip alright?
  55. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    The bottom of the tank is getting there now! I'm really pretty sure you have a different species that is slightly smaller than what is in the master culture I've shown you here. I think the intermediate sized ones, between my M. macrocopa and the C. dubia, that I recently aquired and believe to...
  56. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    And a video to try and give you some sense of the population density it runs at. I've been harvesting a lot recently because I'm also feeding newt larvae as well as my fish.
  57. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    A great source of algae covered leaves for shrimp or otocinclus. The clean ones in the first picture have recently been scoured by the shrimp and put back in the moina culture to ripen again. I count 17 large mature ramshorns in here by the way so about 2 per litre as this is probably slightly...
  58. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I don't heat mine at all, they stay at a pretty steady 22c. It would be really interesting to see a side by side comparison of two bottles with the fish mix and inorganic salts. I have some garden fert pellets that I think are about that ratio, I'm going to go dig them out and set up a side by...
  59. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    Beech leaves but not too many as a lot of tannin in the water slows reproduction. With some daphnids you get larger, longer lived individuals but with smaller brood sizes if there is too much tannin in the water.
  60. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    This guy describes a recipe using dry salts and he's also adding dolomite lime.
  61. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    You should see the state of my large master culture, the entire bottom is covered in algae, snail poo, a few leaves and other detritus and I rarely ever siphon much of it off when I perform a water change - occasionally I take a leaf out and let my shrimp clean all the algae off. Once I've...
  62. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    These are the best videos I could get that give you a clear sense of scale and the relative sizes of the three species I believe to be Moina macrocopa, the smaller Moina micrura and Ceriodaphnia dubia.
  63. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I've also had some success lately culturing this fluffy dog on duck and venison sausages.
  64. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    The experimental culture of ceriodaphnia dubia has had an explosion of what looks like Paramecium since I started feeding live chlorella. It would make much more sense for the invasive organism to be rotifers but it really looks like Paramecium to me. Anyway here's a video for anyone curious...
  65. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    What we need to get our hands on is Moina micrura rather than macrocopa. These are much smaller still. I'm in contact with someone who claims to have them, I'm going to get some and we'll see. I will spread them about if they are the real deal.
  66. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I only run 24 hours because I read a paper that very specifically claimed they were most productive under 24 hours of lighting. I don't imagine the difference between 16 and 24 hours makes much difference to production though but I also have some small cultures of very rare moss and liverworts...
  67. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I'm going to respond to lots of the points here because it's good to be able to cross reference our experiences. This reflects my own experience regarding temperature - they for sure like it warm. If I get bored enough I'm going to run some experiments with ephippia that I've produced myself to...
  68. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    By the way for anyone who can't be bothered with this and just wants to culture Moina with yeast the advice I wish someone had given me before I started was don't worry about underfeeding. If you're anything like me you will crash multiple cultures by either feeding too often, or too much yeast...
  69. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    It really is a much better solution than yeast but you can also still supplement with a little yeast, paprika, gram flour or whatever else takes your fancy for even more nutrient dense moina. My bottles are on a pretty much west facing windowsill so they get direct sunlight only in the afternoon...
  70. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I think that's unlikely but a real possibility depending on your fertilization regime. Daphnids really do polish the water until it's crystal clear though, I wait until there's not the slightest hint of cloudiness left in the water before harvesting them anyway as a habit from when I was feeding...
  71. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    I hope it might be useful in producing livefood for your scarlet badis breeding project! just let me know if you need starters of Moina or Chlorella. Happy to provide small amounts of both for free to such a worthy cause.
  72. L

    How to: Clean, easy and highly nutritious greenwater culture for Daphnia and Moina.

    Recently I asked on here whether anybody had experience cultivating the green algae Chlorella vulgaris in freshwater for use in feeding Moina macrocopa cultures. The species is often used in saltwater phytoplankton systems, and is the preferred food for industrial scale Daphnia and Moina...
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