[Pavel Chaloupka]

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.