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Daphnia live food harvesting link

Thanks Robbie, have just set up my own daphnia cultures this week to help feed my gouramis. Always good to have a bit more info though. Yeast seems to be the best food for easy culturing.

Cheers
 
ourmanflint said:
Thanks Robbie, have just set up my own daphnia cultures this week to help feed my gouramis. Always good to have a bit more info though. Yeast seems to be the best food for easy culturing.

Cheers
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I use a mix of yeast, baby formula and spirulina. Works a treat 😉


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Hi all,
Robbie X said:
Found a great link for peeps interested in collecting Daphnia as a source of live food.
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Microscopy UK is a great site.<http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/index.html>.
ourmanflint said:
Yeast seems to be the best food for easy culturing
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Yeast works really well, sometimes too well and you have to be a little bit careful as it is really easy to crash the cultures. Daphnia pick up any suitably sized food item from the water column, and I've used Paprika and Gram flour successfully in the past.

I'm now adding hay or dead leaves to all my cultures, it makes them easier to keep long term, details in the caudata.org link in this thread. <http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/daphnia-farm-in-the-garden-pondering.22445/> & <http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/uses-for-phytoplankton-in-fresh-water-setup.24247/>

cheers Darrel
 
dw1305 said:
..
I'm now adding hay or dead leaves to all my cultures, it makes them easier to keep long term, details in the caudata.org link in this thread. <http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/daphnia-farm-in-the-garden-pondering.22445/> & <http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/uses-for-phytoplankton-in-fresh-water-setup.24247/>

cheers Darrel
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Good idea Darrel. I remember using hay to start Paramecium cultures way back so I'm guessing it's because of the natural infusoria bloom. I think I will try that too.

Cheers
 
I'm now adding hay or dead leaves to all my cultures, it makes them easier to keep long term, details in the caudata.org link in this thread. <http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/daphnia-farm-in-the-garden-pondering.22445/> & <http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/uses-for-phytoplankton-in-fresh-water-setup.24247/>

cheers Darrel[/quote]

Hi Darrel! Great link, thanks for that.

Have you stopped adding yeast, flour etc all together now? Have you found that the dead leaves/hay are a sufficient food source on there own for the daphnia?

I have a couple of 40l buckets in my attic, with DIY foam filters. I've been doing small weekly water changes and feed the daphnia daily (small amounts) on a yeast, baby formula and spirulina mix. The leaf/hay method sounds simpler and much easier to maintain, is it really just a case of dumping a handful of leaves in a bucket?

Thanks,

Lee.
 
Mine are living on a hair algae culture.

Entirely inspired by sloth. Came back from a week away and a low tech had crashed into an algae fest while I was away. In the mess of unpacking the bucket full of water and hair algae got left on the side somewhere sunny. The tank had been fed with daphnia and enough survived to explode in the bucket. They now live in a tank on my windowsill. Lives on water change water from a high tech to fertilise the algae. Can't remember feeding it in the last year or so but it does slow down a lot in winter.
 
Hi all,
Lee Sweeting said:
Have you stopped adding yeast, flour etc all together now? Have you found that the dead leaves/hay are a sufficient food source on there own for the daphnia?
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I have, but mainly because I don't have any specific Daphnia cultures any more, I just have the water butts and buckets outside. Since I had access to our allotment, even in the winter I can usually collect some Daphnia once or twice a week. In the summer I have a pretty limitless supply of mosquito larvae via the same source.
ourmanflint said:
I remember using hay to start Paramecium cultures way back so I'm guessing it's because of the natural infusoria bloom.
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I think that probably is the reason. If I went back to culturing Daphnia in a tank, I'd definitely add some hay and probably feed them a bit less frequently.

The "2 tanks phytoplankton" system works, but I wasn't space limited when I did this because I had the tanks in the greenhouse, and I had easy access to fertilisers etc. The Chlorella is a fiddle to culture, mainly because you tend to get problems with Rotifers. These are fantastic fry food, but cause the Chlorella culture to crash. You can harvest the Rotifers with a brine shrimp sieve, the Chlorella should pass through the mesh and the Rotifers are retained. This also gives you a clean Chlorella culture to start again with, but it is all an extra faff.

cheers Darrel
 
dw1305 said:
I have, but mainly because I don't have any specific Daphnia cultures any more, I just have the water butts and buckets outside. Since I had access to our allotment, even in the winter I can usually collect some Daphnia once or twice a week. In the summer I have a pretty limitless supply of mosquito larvae via the same source.
Click to expand...

Thanks Darrel!

With a view to making things as simple as possible for myself, could i just pop a handful of oak leaves in my culture and leave be? Would this be a sufficient food source for my indoor cultures?

Thanks Lee.
 
Hi all,
Lee Sweeting said:
could i just pop a handful of oak leaves in my culture and leave be? Would this be a sufficient food source for my indoor cultures?
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I'm not sure that oak leaves would work, my suspicion is that it needs to be something with both accessible (sugars, starch) and more decomposition resistant carbohydrates (lignocellulosic material).

You can buy hay for Rabbit feed etc., or "pick your own" in the summer.

cheers Darrel
 
I get Daphnia from my neighbours rain water butt all year round. Someone spotted me last night with head torch on fishing around with my net in the container lol, must think i'm mad.

It slows down a lot in the very cold weather (although i can usually scoop enough for 2/3 feeds a week) but after a bit of sun lately there's freaking loads in there again 😉
 
Rob P said:
I get Daphnia from my neighbours rain water butt all year round. Someone spotted me last night with head torch on fishing around with my net in the container lol, must think i'm mad.

It slows down a lot in the very cold weather (although i can usually scoop enough for 2/3 feeds a week) but after a bit of sun lately there's freaking loads in there again 😉
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I need to check my water butt! I did not think about that as a source of Daphnia! Mind, I have never seeded it with pond water or plants so its probably not got any🙁
 
Nathaniel Whiteside said:
Anybody have any experience using This?

How do brine shrimp compare to daphnia as a live food source?
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Yea the JBL hatcher is good (i have one) but you can make the same thing from a pop bottle if you don't want to spend the money. Obviously this is only used to hatch the shrimp so you would need a larger holding tank to grow the shrimp. I just use a 25l plastic storage box which works great.

I culture brine shrimp, daphina and microworms. The brine shrimp are the most nutritious and can be fed every day. The daphnia are good for fibre, and i only feed these twice a week. The microworms are very fatty and i also feed these twice a week. All are easy to culture, and are relatively cheap to get started.[DOUBLEPOST=1395938064][/DOUBLEPOST]
dw1305 said:
Hi all, I'm not sure that oak leaves would work, my suspicion is that it needs to be something with both accessible (sugars, starch) and more decomposition resistant carbohydrates (lignocellulosic material).

You can buy hay for Rabbit feed etc., or "pick your own" in the summer.

cheers Darrel
Click to expand...

Just been out and bought some rabbit feeding hay, i've popped in one of the cultures and left the other as it was. I'll let know how they compare.

Thanks again Darrel.
 
Robbie X said:
I need to check my water butt! I did not think about that as a source of Daphnia! Mind, I have never seeded it with pond water or plants so its probably not got any🙁
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There's no pond water or plants in the one i use, just rain water. I checked with neighbour if she's ever/does ever put any nasties in there but she's like an old school hippy (old bath tub in back garden to put plants in sort of old dear) so it seems safe to use. In summer I get bloodworm and mozzy larvae in with the scoops as well 😉
 
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