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.
The
PAROSPHROMENUS PROJECT
