Methods to breed Moina?

I only run indoor cultures during winter. We have two big tanks on the garden with trees growing around and leaves falling in the water. There is naturaly enough organic material for moina and you get great moina production so I prefere to use this method. But before the winter I catch some moina and start indoor culture in 20 litr buckets. I have tried different feeding over time. When I started with moina I used yeast but it seemed to me that even though you can improve its nutritional value and have a great food, its quite a mastery to not overfeed and not to have a lot of debris in the culture. The same are other dead foods like spirulina powder and such stuff. Since then I started to use different live algae, becouse algae cultures give you the opportunity to culture Rotifera too and its almost impossible to kill the cultures by feeding. Different algae strains are able to produce different nutrients under right conditions. You can then produce moina with high HUFA content, CGF and natural xanthins. The problem is that culturing algae under such conditions needs you to prepare the media for it and it takes quite a lot of “lab” work. But you could get some former Chlorella strains that are pretty easy for cultivation, even during the winter when there is not much light becouse you can cultivate them mixotrophicaly or even heterotrophicaly. Some other algae have this ability too. Its always better to use more strains of different algae especialy when mostly feed with moina only, but of course I am sure that many aquarists can get by with one algae strain and not much else. Its just a question of how much effort you are willing to put in and how high quality of moina you need to get.

Well, first get starting culture. ALWYAS have another culture under less intesive conditions. Especially when you are new to this, you will not be able to tell how close you are to the colapse of the culture and that is something that is very hard to explain. Water parameters, type and dilution of media, temperature and of course you particular strain of algae play a role here. But if you take some of the water and start new cultures every time when you are going to bring you culture to the bigger bottle or bucket, you can let some cultures run and learn it this way. Then you need NPK fertiliser, the type used for the start of growing period of plants (high in N, you need aproximately 6:1 N to P ratio). Use the minimum dosage used for plants. If you are going to cultivate Chlorella with little to no light, you will need glucose, you can add from 0,2 to 2 g/l. When you get the culture, prepare the cultivation medium from aged tap water ( 1-2 days)and use 90% of medium and 10% of starting culture. When you get the density of the starting culture, go on and repeat the process. If you are able to use transparent buckets, its better, you do not need light to culture the algae but you need it for algae to produce carotenoids and other valuable stuff. Autotrophicaly cultivated algae are dark green to blue, heterotrophic cultivation results in very light green or even yellow color. What you are going to end up with is called mixotrophic cultivation. It means you have light during the day and becouse you added the glucose your algae will still grow during the night or lets be more precise, when there is simply not enough light. Another thing you need is strong aeration (big bubbles)to stear the culture becouse algae would sediment. Even with the aeration, stear the bucket manually like once a day. If you have big enough density,turn of the aerations and let it sediment. Than you can harvest with air tube and if you need filter over some kind lab filtration paper, but that little medium is not harmfull for moina at all, there are mixed methods of culturing Moina or Daphnia with the algae in the same tank, but they are way less efective that the other continuous cultivation methods. Than just put in enough algae to the moina culture that you are not able to see the bottom and be prepared to harwest and even trough away some moina, they reproduce very fast when you add algae in their diet. You can still add yeast, but much less than before. My way is that I harvest some moina, put it aside to another bucket, feed it with yeast and than rinse it and feed it to fish. This way you can encapsulate moina with anything you want but you are able to have quite safe clean culture with not much dead organic material and bacteriae.

Oh… I don’t know, why the foto is turned on the top … My original is normal ….

if you have a chance to use aged tap water, than its ok. With Moina I use mostly the water that I get out of my tanks when doing water changes. Its still ok for Moina. I just add a little tap water to make it less acidic. I do that becouse cross contamination with other food organism from my tank never caused problem with Moina. On the other hand I never do that with Rotifera cultures, as mainly cross contamination with Moina can destroy the culture very fast.

there are fertilizers for different stages of plant growth, so take anything for fertilization of young plants. Its quite cheap so buying more than one and trying what works best is probably the way to go. You can even buy combined fertilizer for the same purpose (young plants) it has microelements in it but that is even better. Its realy not a big deal. Or ask whoever you obtain the starting culture from, how they prepare the cultivation medium, than you can be sure to have one method that works and only improve it if you need to.

Hello Helene!
I guess you mean me? 😉

This morning I already answered, but I guess I have pushed the cancel button than the submit button, I fear …

Now again: The moina food from the online shop interaquaristic contend:

spirolina, barley grass, dried nettles, honey pollen, oatmeal, paprika powder, rice.

I use as you see on the foto the half transparent container of aquaristic filter (eheim).
So I can see with a torch, how many moina are ready to go. I take them with a nauplia sieve out and wash them with tap water. I hope, this way I catch 99 % living moinas
When I change the water, I let the old water also go through the moina sieve, so I don’t loose any moina.
Then they need about a half day to come up again.

And one thing they write about the moina food is real: It makes the water smell nearly good, I have no stinking material in my room, if I change the water weekly for about 65%.

Our tap water ist very good – conductivity about 240 mS, dKH about 4. Better than any aquaristic shop water I got till now:

I think I leave enough old water in the containers, so the fresh tap water will grow older within seconds 😉