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[quote=”Ted” post=3593]Moina were my favorite foods (for the Paros.. ha, ha)
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Made my day Ted 🙂I do not think that Caridina would be able to consume live Chlorrela unless you let the algae sediment and put a lot in to the tank. But you can grow sessile algae on surface of different objects and offer these to your Caridina. The method for cultivation is basically the same, but you mostly do not need to look for starting culture, simply finding a stone or anything else overgrown with algae should work. Than you can use the same type of cultivation media and just put some objects in it. After they are overgrown with algae, you simply move these to shrimp or catfish tanks, or wherever you need. Whats great is sessile algae are very often again overgrown with sessile Rotifera,so it may very well happen that you could be able to cultivate both this way. Most of the time when we see some kind of fish to nibble on surfaces overgrown with algae, they are most likely to be feeding on other organisms that themselves feed on algae cells. Most of the algae are digestible for crustaceans, but not for higher water organisms, becouse their cell membranes consist of cellulose.
This is very important when you want to use dried powder algae product. Some people use Chlorella powder to feed food organisms and even fish fry. But such kind of powder is produced by processing the dried Chlorella in special mills, that crush the cell membranes and make the valueable nutrients accesible. The problem is that when you put this powder in to the water, all the nutrients from the crushed cells dissolve in water and what you end up doing is you simply polute the water and mostly feed with empty cell membranes that have close to zero nutritional value (the same as with frozen live foods) . So if you ever want to use powder substance, go for Spirulina. Spirulina is not alga, its basically bacteria and its cell membranes are easily digestible, therefore it does not have to be processed this way and its cell membranes are not damaged. If you do not overfeed, it is great for example to grow bigger brine shrimp that you than use for feeding. Of course you can use it for Moina too, but its pretty much the same as with yeast. Its hard to feed just enough, but not to much. When you intend to use it, the best preparation is to use a small vial with cover. Put in some water, a little of the powder and let it soak for couple minutes. Than shake vigorously untill you get a suspension and feed with it. But again in my eyes, all the dry foods are better for encapsulation of food organisms right before feeding where you can put some harvested animals aside and let them feed in special container for couple hours.Well all the the exact data I have ever seen on lighting for algae cultures were simply number of photons/second/ and some square unit, as I based all my cultivation methods on scientific papers, but I would assume that is not very helpful for you 🙂 But intensive outdoor cultivation runs well with daylight, use any daylight type if you want to have lighting. Do not use to strong, very strong lighting may lead to the colapse of the culture. South directed windows are not optimal during summer. I use small aquariums for cultivation that are built to be like 30x30x10 cm and place them on the window or give a 18w tube in front of two of them. With the earation stearing, all cells should get enough light. What seems to be more important for intensive cultivation is for how long per day the light is available. 12-16 hours is ok. Of course longer is better but again, 12 hours is just ok. If you intend to do it start slow, with new cultures, if you have windows in the room you do not need any aditional lighting for starting the culture. After when you have bigger tanks and high density of algae, than lighting helps.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, what Ted says makes sence to me, as most eggs do not last for days when they are not fertlized. The only disadvantage with labyrinth fish is that they have whitish eggs and you can not tell they were not fertilized becouse they do not get white within couple hours. Only some killifish eggs last very long even when not fertilized as they have the super thick chorions, but again they turn from clear to white and even before that you can clearly see there is no perivitelline space in there so you can remove them before any kind of fungus becomes an issue. Thats what seems to me like a problem when you remove the eggs and hatch them without the male as I dont know how to recognize the dead eggs before they are covered by fungus. I have to try on my own as soon as I have enough offspring of my first paros.
Yeah but if they die becouse of high pH or for some other reason, you still will not know if they were fertilized or not. Becouse most of the fertilized eggs that die will die during the very first stages of developement. So if you isolate the clutch there is no guarantee you get information you wanted to get if the eggs do not develop. Just comes to my mind. Are the eggs so whitish that the perivitelline space is not visible? And if yes, could it be visible under strong light? If you are planning to take out the eggs anyways, could you have a look? Than you clearly know if the cluch is fertilized. On such big eggs it should be even visible without magnifying glass. If its not visbble becouse of the eggs coloration, than using some dye like methylen blue could help, as it would penetrate unfertilized eggs much more than fertilized ones. But you would have to check with some fertilized eggs first to be able to tell the difference.
Not being a paro expert yet I still would not blame the male first. Him eating eggs is much more likely to be for a reason than him being an egg eater. If it is a young pair of fish poor fertilization could be a problem as with a lot of other species and even if is not, environmental conditions like pH, humic substances or temperature could be wrong. What is suficient for other Paros at your stock does not have to be enough for your new fish.
I of course know very little about paro habitats, but from what I know about some South American species, quite a lot of them are not found in strictly one type of water as far as color goes as long as other parameters like hardness and acidity are met. Some Nannostomus and Rivulus occur in both blackwater and clearwater. + the color of the water may change over years. So if Bernd cought them in clearwater, it does not have to mean they occur strictly in clearwater habitats and vice versa. The coloration they have may be useful even in clearwater environment with dense growth of costal vegetation over the water surface as there is also very little light penetrating.
I have seen that shop on Aquabid many times, must be nice to have such an option if you get paro hungry like I am now 😀 In my country you dont see much of paro offers, but at least they are usually 2-3 bucks a fish. I think the traders do not get why someone would buy something that looks like paros in their tanks for more money :unsure:
Now that the other female has places to hide, its quite ok. She just has to stay hidden. I will definitely leave them alone until there is a clutch in there. I have enough tanks and if the clutch will develop, I was planning to move the adults to another tank so if she will be still stressed and parsued I will move the pair in some other tank. I hope to have some other species of paros next week so I could set up two small tanks for breeding each species and two bigger tanks for housing the rest of the groups at least as long as I built more breeding tanks.
Hello,
Just find this and thats quite interesting topic. I posed myself the same question some time ago. Becouse I was able to detect some low but measurable levels of NH4+ (0,5 mg/l) I was never able to find any extensive info about NH4+ longterm toxicity even in mass aquaculture guides and theses on water chemistry. All I was able to find is that NH4+ has a very limited ability to permeate cell membranes and that is why we do not see any symptoms of poisoning. The problem is that in most tanks with pH as low as we prepare for paros, the nitrification proces known from “normal” tanks is probably not present, as from the information I have, most of the strains of nitrification bacteriae basicly stop their metabolism under pH 6,5. Some archea strains are beleaved to be responsible for the nitrogene cyclus in low pH waters instead. There is a topic on this on Seriously fish. com but also very little helpful info, just a lot of guessing. I spotted another fact, that even though there were no fast growing plants in my tanks, the level of amonia was not growing significantly. To prove that nitrification as we know it from other tanks is working, you would have to make sure that NO3 levels goes up (but that does not have to be the case, some strains are capable of denitrification too, under specific conditions), so that would need some long term experiment I had no time to do untill now. What I did is that started to measure NH4+ levels in all my tanks including new setups. Here we get to the interesting point. I had a new tank that was newly setup just 2 days before with no fish, waiting for the pH to go down for a pair of Laimosemion xiphidius. I was able to detect again about 0,5 mg/L NH4+. That seemed strange becouse I used pure RO water mixed with enough tap water to encrease the conductivity to 20µS which is in my case about 50 ml of tap water for one liter of RO water. As I was quite sure any such levels of NH4+ would be nonsensic in tap water from water mains in a big town, I felt like the only reasonable explanation was the peat granules were responsible for this. So i started an experiment with different kinds of peat form different sources. As a killifish breader I had like 6 different types of peat at hand, so I used 1 liter plastic containers for food storing, each with 1 liter of RO water ( no NH4+ measurable) and 10% volume of peat ( I used peat moss, granules, two black peats sold localy in my country for aquaristics pusposes and two garden peats. I covered the tanks to avoid polution and left them stand for 24 hours. In all of the tank certain levels of NH4+ were measurable, from 0,5 mg/l up to 2 mg/l (in all above cases Sera NH3/NH4+ test was used). Sera super peat granules with level of 0,5 mg/l, Fluval peat moss (peat fibers) 1mg/l. One of the garden peats 2mg/l. I am planning to visit some peat bogs and swamp and try to inoculate some tanks with samples of water and upper layer of peat to try to find if in any of these the could get the natural nitrogen cyclus running + try to find some tanks of mine that have no NH4+ levels measurable and inoculate some tanks with mesurable levels to see if it changes stuff. As I work from home and I am already slacking quite a lot investing much more time in to my fish than I should + have some algae feeding to moina project running right now, this will take some time for me to start with it. It would be great if we could collect sama data from other members about it too or some info from natural paro localities if there are any levels of NH4+ measurable. It could very well work in a way where such nutrients are processed after the water from peat bogs reaches bigger streams and rivers. All I can say now, that anyone using peat for example for water conditioning as most killifish breeders do, is probably dosing some NH4+ in the water. It would be nice if anyone could try to repeat my experiment and try to measure the levels for longer period of time. Of course I will post here as soon as I have some more results and observations. End of next year mostl likely 😀
