Daphnia Bloom?

[Marcia]

Hi everyone, trying not to panic here (breathe, breathe) but please help 😩

I’ve been feeding frozen daphnia once a week to my fishes for a few weeks now. Yesterday during water change I’ve noticed some sort of white dust in the water column and then millions of it clang onto the glass. Using my child’s bug magnifier we found out they are a living thing! I don’t know what exactly but I assume they are daphnia from the frozen food? There are billions of it! The tank most affected is the Fluval Flex 34L with shrimps and one thicklipped Gourami who seems a bit frantic. Apart from water changes is there anything I should do to decrease the population? Thank you.

 

[tam]

Probably seed shrimp rather than daphnia - free livefood for your fish. You'll have more the shrimp tank as there is less fish to eat it. Lighten up the feeding for a couple of days and I imagine the fish will take care of it for you - you can catch them out the shrimp tank to feed your others. A tea stainer will catch them or suck some up with a syphon and release for snacking.

 

[louis_last]

I would bet on copepods rather than seed shrimp based on the description of "white dust" but either way they are almost definitely harmless and the population will eventually recede.
There's also many small fish that will eat huge numbers of either copepods or seed shrimp.

 

[Marcia]

Thank you @tam and @louis_last for your inputs. it’s a great relief that either - shrimps seeds or copepods - are harmless. My worry was that they could increase pollution and harm the fishes. I’ve done a second water change and it’s not so overwhelming now. Thank you for the much needed reassurance.

 

[louis_last]

Thank you @tam and @louis_last for your inputs. it’s a great relief that either - shrimps seeds or copepods - are harmless. My worry was that they could increase pollution and harm the fishes. I’ve done a second water change and it’s not so overwhelming now. Thank you for the much needed reassurance.

I'm guessing you probably have fairly hard water as copepods don't really boom like that unless there's a lot of minerals for them in addition to food as they moult so often and reproduce so quickly. There's really no downside to having them in your aquarium unless you just really don't like the look.

 

[Marcia]

Hi @louis_last I have very soft water here in Yorkshire but I did give Glasgarten Mineral Junkie for the shrimps a while ago. And I have 2 small dragon stones in the tank so maybe those factors contributed to the bloom? There are lots of shrimplets in the tank too. Originally I had 7 shrimps 5-6 weeks ago. Two got berried and now we can see few baby shrimps around, so could this bloom still be shrimp seeds? The huge numbers seem out of proportion but I don’t know how many seeds can they produce…