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Black mosquitoes larvae and pupae. Perfectly safe for the fish 😉 just do not expose yourself to the imagoes and everyone will be fine :whistle:
Add the cultivation sulution with fertilizer so that algae can reproduce again. If you want very high quality algae, let it sediment or filter it and dilute the cultivation solution in like 1:10 ratio with tap water (if you have very low NO3 content) or better RO water . Algae will not have nutrients and will not multiply but it will produce storage substances which will make it much more valuable. 3 days like this should be enough. Than use it for feeding Moina.
Hey,
you can just use it with the culture solution, its no problem. If you want to separate it, either let it sediment in the bucket and use air tube to drain it or if you need just clean algae, you can use labarotory filtration paper and a cone. Than you can even rinse it, but if you use it for Moina it is not necessary, just use like 1/2 a litre of algae solution for every 10 liters of Moina culture and keep the water a little green. Add when you see it is clean again.[quote=”Vale!” post=3760]So is there an optimum duration that you’d allow a culture to run ; and how do you tell if a culture requires renewal ‘early’, as it were?[/quote] Sorry, did not answer this. This is the hard part that you need to learn from experience, so it is best to run several cultures and keep them on different densities. The same with algae. It is very dependent of how much and what you feed it (and as well as with the fish, you need to learn to feed just enough dependent on the density), the atributes of the starting culture (some populations will be able to survive under worse conditions then others) That is why it is best to collect for example Rotifera inoculations from muddy puddles. Lab Moina cultures may be much more sensitive to polution than some wild Moina you would collect yourself and vice versa.
[quote=”Vale!” post=3760]My own Moina culture method has been OK but results in a variable supply. Numbers will build until there are absolutely zillions of them, then recede until there are only a few hundred or so before building again! I’d like to achieve a more dependable supply [/quote]
Well, this is completely normal. We have to realize that this is how it works in nature with most of the populations of any creatures. Only what we see with Moina is extreme example of how it works, becouse Moina is transfering close to 70% of the total energy income in to the reproduction. What we can learn form this… As long as there is enough food and space and the envinronment factors are within the boundaries for the species( polution, temperature,oxygen, some light), the population will grow. With Moina this growing population typically consists of females only and these females are literally cloning themselves (you can try and start a population with a single female), so the more females there are, the faster the growth of the population. This is the stage of the population that we need to achieve to get enough food for the fish and we want to keep this going. Because we work with a closed system, at some point the population will reach the breaking point which means there is not enough of something( food, oxygen, space) or to much of something (waste products). Mostly it will be lack of oxygen and to much of waste product. Than almost all the organisms would die and the population will colapse. But even before that happens, we are getting to some unwanted field. Many organisms will stop the reproduction before their populations would colapse. Moina will only make changes to the process. Once the environmental conditions start to deteriorate, the parthenogenetic females give birth to sexual females and males. The sexual females start to produce ephippia (the resting eggs similarly as Artemia does). These will sink to the bottom and wait for better times to start the population again when conditions are good (in theory you should almost always be able to get some moina again if you let the bucket dry for one or two weeks and add some aged water) . Sexual females may switch back to the parthenogenetic reproduction any time, they only need one moulting for that but compared with a lot of Daphnia, parthenogenetic females of Moina can not switch to sexual reproduction, they need to be born as sexual females to have that ability.
So back to your question 🙂 My point with feeding the living algae to Moina si mainly much slower deterioration of the the environment becouse the unconsumed food does not polute the water and it is constantly available as high quality food. Also it is one of the natural foods so its very well digestible for Moina which again leads to less waste products and therefore less polution of the water. Also some algae and cyanobacteriae contain very valuable nutrients that work as probiotics, growth factors and color enhancers for the fish as well as source proteins and fats in the very form that is best for the fish. Thats for the algae.
What you need to do to keep the culture as we want it, so with parthenogenetic females only and constant reproduction, you need to harvest enough Moina and exchange enough water often enough (on daily basis if needed). This way you should be able to maintain the culture for quite a long time. Of course there is a catch. With partial water changes you only dilute the waste products to some extend. Imagine that you have 100% of polutants in the water and than you make a 50% water exchange with absolutely clean water. 50% of the previous polutants are still in the bucket and Moina will add to it again before you make another water exchange so the levels of the polutants are still growing, the whole process is just slowed down to some extend. Some day you will get to the point where these substances will reach sexual reproduction inducing levels or in the worst case kill the culture. Thats why we need to start the new cultures over and over. If you want continous and effective production, you need to built a drop system. You would start with algae cultivation medium that drops to the tank where algae are cultivated and then algae drop to the tank with Moina and Moina drops in the bucket or sieve where you gather it for feeding. This is how it is done in commercial hatcheries. I hope that helps. Sorry if I have to many spelling mistakes in the “article :D”, I am not patient enough to go trough it couple times.Glad to hear that Hans 🙂 May be the male moved some of the eggs somewhere else in the tank. I was able to observe one spawn where it seemed like the eggs would not stick to the surface of the cave and they were all laying on the ground, but the male moved them to a cave that was formed out of leaves from the leaf litter in the tank, raised them there and after couple days he moved the larvae back to the pottery cave. But I think this particular male does this on regular basis becouse I was never able to observe him guyrding eggs in the cave but I was isolating larvae from this cave before.
I will try to make some reasonable courtship coloration pictures as soon as I have good enough equipment. My males show this very often but I only have a bad camera and when I tried to change the water so its clear or when you add strong enough light to be able to make pictures they become all pale so its worth nothing. They are simply spoiled I think :unsure:
These are by far the best pictures I was able to make so far :but thats with very strong lighting right above the male and still its not enough light for the camera to capture it clear.
Yeah Bill, I can get Paros from trade within a range of 2-5 bucks each. But that depends on market I think. The standard of life here is not nearly as high as in the U.S. and Germany or other Western Europe countries + Czech Republic always used to be a big exporter of ornamental fish, so people are used to pay less for the fish here. On the other hand this leads to lower quality of some imported fish becouse of the the need to keep the price low. There is not such an offer here as Wetspot has on Aquabid for example. But there were two species of Paros available within a period of one months lately. I was really suprised how cheap they are here. But all in all what none of us get from the trade are fish with certain locality of collection.
[quote=”Peter Finke” post=3735] An sometimes it even struck Paros: I shall always remember te sight of 800 P. ornaticauda with 400 dead by arrival already; 300 followed during the next days. With many fish transports this is quite normal. That’s one reason why I hate that business and work for the private solution.[/quote]
Sorry Peter, forgot about this. That is why I was suggesting someone from the P_P project doing this and packing the fish one by one in those special bags. Then in the case that one fish dies in the bag, no other specimens are harmed by water polution by dead animals in the bag. We also have to keep in mind that we are dealing with healthy fish in very good condition and therefore such cases would be very rare. The most important thing is that we do not put dozens of fish in one bag.I think that even if we get close to 10 Euros for one fish it is not a problem. I would guess in Germany and everywhere else in western Europe any common Apistogramma would be the same price or more and most people would buy 1-2 pairs of Paros so I would not be scared that people who look for Paros as such would not pay that price for healthy and nice fish without risking issues with weakened and damaged specimens from direct imports.
I agree that starting an exchange thread for small amount of fish between the hobbyists is probably not a problem and could work well. But I think that solving of how to get rare Paros to countries where no or very little personal imports have been done in the past is very important or else these countries would pretty much depend on the trade only. I agree that the procedure that I sugeested would take effort and depending on the size of the shipment some space for storing the bags for 2-3 days(seems to me like the worst case) before the whole shipment is collected and dispatched, but on the other hand it would most easily solve the distribution to the other countries far from Germany or even other continents + it gives us the opportunity to get rid of (forgive me that expression :))larger number of animals from single breaders.
Getting the fish to G.B.,Norway, U.S. What comes to my mind is that this could be done pretty much the same way as the whole companies do it. We would just need a little (or quite some, depending on point of view)organisation. Once in a while we would need to make public (for the members of P-P or possibly other Labyrinth fish assotiatons)offer of available Paros and have someone for each of the specific countries to collect the demans. Than the fish would be packed in Gordon breathing bags one by one(Special bags made of a foil that is able to let carbon dioxide out and oxygen in. You only put in enough water for the fish to have a little space. Its perfectly safe as you can pack each individiual separately and the water is not moving nearly as much as with air so it is even less stresfull). And a big styro box would be sent by plane. This way you could send at least 100 Paros for one cargo cost and make shipments effective. For those who are scared to send fish. Please be aware that if you prepare it well (packing) and you give the boxes to cargo company on the airport, you exactly know how many hours this is going to take. Of course there may be problems if the shipment is send wrong way and ends up delayed, but I have seen that done many times with fish from SA and Asia and I was unpacking the fish myself. If you send healthy a and properly starved fish, with todays heatpacks its really ok. So if we would do this lets say every 1/2 year, it could work fine. Or if demands were colected permanently, it could be done every time the box would be full. Of course there would have to be someone on each end who would be willing to pack and send or pick up and resend the fish. Single shipments of couple fish will be always possible by parcels, but it is and will always be expansive. If you buy a pair of wild Bettas from some of the trans-shippers that import the fish from Asia to you, you would mostly pay like 70 USD and more than 1/2 of it is the shipping costs. I think we have to accept that.
As this way, no addresses would be revealed, only stocks + it would be an efficient way to get Paros to the other continents too.
Yeah, we would have to distribute halogen lights to the jury and all the visitors. :cheer: Of course, what I wanted to point out from Micoljis work were those endless hours of underwater footage from the localities. But its true, that most of those that would be interesting for us are probably to dark of blackwater even though I am sure he would be able to scratch out something from it with his professional equipment and willigness to snorkel even in quite a cold water.
Wow, Ivan Mikolji in the jury B) . So bad no one does simmilar job with Asian localities. If anyone is interested to see great stuff, check his youtube channel. For example this: [video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X22kKZ98oCY&list=TLcZXi2jMUVZ1R60YBhG2DwxdJrP-o4nt3[/video]
