[abcha0s]

So - my culture (T. Isochrysis) crashed after roughly 30 days. I learned a lot in the process. So that others can benifit from my trials and errors, here are some thoughts.

Firstly - make sure that you know why you want to culture phytoplankton. My initial motivation was to feed a secondary culture of copepods which would then be food for a Mandarin.

Secondly - While this sounds perfectly reasonable, it is far from easy and a LOT of work. If you are doing this simply to keep a mandarin, then head my warning and stop. It is not worth the effort or expense.

(BTW - After a couple of weeks eating the pods in my tank, my mandarin started eating spirulina enriched frozen brine and mysis).

Some key points from my experience.

About pods
* Understand the difference between harpacticoid and calinoid copepods.
* Tiger-Pods from Reef Nutrition have particular challanges surviving in a reef tank. I did not have a good experience with them. if you have a reef tank, my advice is to avoid this species. They may be usefull in a FOWLR.
* copepods DO survive the trip through your return pump MOST of the time. The problem is that in a high flow system, they make the trip again and again. Within a day or two, they have all made the trip many times and are all now dead.
* copepods are not necessarily cultured the same way as rotifers. There are likely some similarities, but if you are culturing copepods - make sure you have a plan that is not based on research around culturing rotifers.
* Everybody and their cousin cultures rotifers - not nearly as many people culture copepods.
* Mandarins will eat other pods - not just copepods. I have lots of ampipods in my tank and my mandarin loves them.
* Do not buy copepods that you can not see. If you can't see them, neither can your mandarin.
* For a wealth of knowledge - search the web for "Dr. Adelaide Rhodes" - She sells everything you need and will ship to Canada if you are really nice to her. I brought in my T. Iso culture from her as well as a bulk culture of 5000 Tibse sp. copepods. They were all big enough to count and all very active when they arrived. (Group order anyone?)

About Phytoplankton (T. Isochrysis unless otherwise specified)
* Nanno is easier to culture, but less useful. Copepods don't benifit much from Nanno.
* T. Iso is extremely sensative to temperature. It must be constant. I'm not sure what "ideal" is - does anyone else know?
* Bacterial contamination is a real problem. Have a strategy for dealing with this.
* Predation (ie. introduction of rotifers/pods) is potentially a problem.
* I was never able to figure out when to split my culture. It is difficult to tell when the nutrients have been consumed.
* If you wait to long to split the culture, it will crash.
* If you split the culture to soon, it will thin out and may crash.
* Split early if you are not sure.
* Put the live phyto in your tank at your own risk. I would advise against this based on the presence of unconsumed nutrients in the phytoplankton. If you split to early, there will be excess nutrients. If you wait until the nutrients are consumed, the likelyhood of a crash increased.
* SP should be around 1.019 (not full strength SW).

About automation of your system
* Forget about it - you can't automate this on a small scale. Possibly on a larger commercial scale, but not in your basement.
* I bought all of the pumps to automate my system (Aqua Medic Reef Doser Quad Pump). They made it out of the box, but have not yet been plugged in.
* Paristaltic pumps can be used to move phyto and copepods, but you are unlikely to get to the point where you are hooking the pumps up.
* I bought the Aqua Medic Plankton Reactor Light product from JL. I actually like this as a culture vessile for phyto. However, I never figured out how to use it for copepods.

Please feel very free to message me. I invested a lot of time and money into making this work and would gladly share more of my experience. Just because it didn't work for me on my first attemp, doesn't mean that it won't work for you.

-> Please post your experiences to this thread. I may decide to try again, but for different reasons.