Daphnia and brine shrimp questions.

Is one ounce of brine shrimp eggs much? How long would it last? I have some dobro eggs and need to get a food source so I'm looking into these two species. Are daphnia easy to breed? I read the Caudata Culture articles but would like some first hand advise.

Also how do you culture copepods? What do they eat?

Copepods can be cultured just like daphnia, same foods. One ounce of bs eggs is a lot, it would probably last you through one season. Be careful about the source; if the bs eggs are not fresh, the hatch rate is likely to be frustratingly low.

Culturing daphnia is like walking a tightrope: if you do it just right it's easy, but there's a learning curve involved. If you overfeed, underfeed, overharvest, underharvest, etc, the culture dies completely. Getting the right balance involves certain degree of trial and error for most people.

With Daphnia, they really are touch and go. As previous replies state, there is a bit of a trial and error curve. Personally, I have the best luck with Daphnia magna. These guys like cool water and feed well on plain old bakers yeast, powdered spirulina algae, and "greenwater". I like the magnas as temperature is only a factor over temps of 75F (again, my experiences) I find its best to use two cultures, one to feed and one to breed, alternating between the two. Another advantage to magnas, is when a culture starts to wane, put it in an out of the way place and let it crash and burn. Leave it be till all the water has evaporated out, then refill it with aged aquarium water and watch the show! While magnas do grow to a really large size (1/8th of an inch is not uncommon) I use different sizes of fine mesh net to sort them out, the smaller larval forms are perfect for smaller critter food.

For brine shrimp I personally gave up on hatching them out. Instead I decapsulate them and use them with great success, no hatching involved.This is a long, messy, and very stinky process, but the resulting product has carried me through nearly a decade of tropical fish and caudate rearing. There are many sources online on how to do this process, however I don't recommend it with out warning of the chlorine bleach and vinegar stink you end up creating. There used to be commercially available decaps cycts, but I have not seen these since the mid 90s.. I bought a coffee-size can full of cysts three years ago, and keep it in my freezer.

As for copepods, I find them to be the easiest of the bunch as they inhabit my java moss farm tanks naturally. I admit I have very little experience with them otherwise.

There is a book I found at a used book store a few years back that has been of invaluable reference to me. It may be out of print now, as it was originally published in 1937. I have the 1959 reprint from Dover Books. Before you scoff at the age of this volume, keep in mind that a lot of the modern texts make use of methods, chemicals and equipment that the average joe cannot get or afford. This old volume describes methods and equipment you can easily purchase, or in many cases build yourself with ease. I found a copy of the original printing stored online on the Biodiversity Heritage Library website here:http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/title/6012

I bet however, if you check a local university, or used book store you can get a copy of it for cheap. It was reprinted for many, many years. It covers EVERYTHING from protozoa and diatoms all the way up to ascidians and sponges. This has both freshwater and marine animals and algae methods in it, includes copepods, brine shrimp, and a ton of other useful info. I was just browsing a few websites and see the same version I have of it available for 2-5 dollars on quite a few sites.

Hope this helps!

Minor Disclaimer: Due to the age of this book, some of the scientific names are ...well...um..."dated" and in a few cases are outright wrong. Thankfully there haven't been too many taxonomic changes to the above discussed critters.

Great book recommendation. I had nearly forgotten about this book, but we used it when I worked in a biological supply company lab in the early 1970's. It is available from used book sellers on the internet, and a serviceable copy is not expensive.

I would get the isopods, dapnia, and brine shrimp from carolina.com. I know people on this site do not like biological warehouses but they have a good selection and are the only available source for me.

True Daphnia magna should be hitting 5 mm as adults (that's 1/5th of an inch). Daphnia pulex hit about 2-3 mm (about 1/8th of an inch), which is more like the size Johnny mentions.

Great to know that decapped eggs work for newt larvae also. I find that quite surprising. What kind of growth you get compared to brineshrimp?

Best new larval foods seem to be(in descending order)
daphnia
brineshrimp
decapped eggs? microworms?
chopped blackworms.

Right now I am looking into brineshrimp,, copepods, and microworms as my top three. Has anyone cultured copepods or microworms. The CC article tells how to culture microworms but is it easy for a beginner? I have never culured any food source before. Blackworms are not an option for personal reasons.

Microworms are easy to culture but aren't very nutritious. The facts are that weight for weight, newly hatched Artemia (brineshrimp) are the most nutritious food, followed very closely by Daphnia, followed distantly by everything else.

John said:

Microworms are easy to culture but aren't very nutritious.

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You can fix that easily by adding a bit of protein powder to the medium - I had once a batch of killifish eggs and run out of Artemia, so I added some protein powder (for body builders) to the microworms medium and fed exlusively on them for about a week. I've noticed that fry was growing very fast, just as fed on Artemia.
To be sure of it, when I have another batch I'll divide them into 2 groups and will feed one on gutloaded microworms and the other on Artemia - just for the record

pesco said:

You can fix that easily by adding a bit of protein powder to the medium - I had once a batch of killifish eggs and run out of Artemia, so I added some protein powder (for body builders) to the microworms medium and fed exlusively on them for about a week. I've noticed that fry was growing very fast, just as fed on Artemia.
To be sure of it, when I have another batch I'll divide them into 2 groups and will feed one on gutloaded microworms and the other on Artemia - just for the record

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Salamanders are not killifish.

Never had any luck with microworms, myself. The cultures always crashed on me. I gave it a try more on principal, as the nutritional value is negligable.
(As I have read here and many other sources...)

With deccapped cysts though, I would estimate I get about a 20% better survival rate among axolotl neonates. (my notos and cynops do well on them too, though they seem to prefer daphnia) While many claims are made that decapped cysts are more nutritious than hatched napuli, I personally can't provide evidence of this. I do suspect it has more to do with availability- ceccapped cysts sink right to the bottom where hungry neonates can get right at them. Another note on decaps- you really have to keep up on the tank maintenance when using them, the uneaten ones form an orange sticky layer of fungus if you do not, that axie hatchlings WILL try to eat, resulting in choking deaths.

I'll add in here, I have had great luck cultureing "vinegar eels", however, I have never used them for caudates as the jump in water pH that can happen from feeding these to neonates could be an issue.

caudatadude28 said:

I would get the isopods, dapnia, and brine shrimp from carolina.com. I know people on this site do not like biological warehouses but they have a good selection and are the only available source for me.

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There are A LOT cheaper places to get food. Try Dallas Discus.

John said:

Salamanders are not killifish.

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And? How is it related to nutritional value of microworms?



I have done some online research today and it is likely that it wasn't only the protein powder ...
Lecture of http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/003/W3732E/w3732e0y.htm#6.2. Nematodes strongly advised

SludgeMunkey said:

Never had any luck with microworms, myself. The cultures always crashed on me. I gave it a try more on principal, as the nutritional value is negligable.
(As I have read here and many other sources...)

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I wouldn't say so - look at the link in my previous post.

While many claims are made that decapped cysts are more nutritious than hatched napuli, I personally can't provide evidence of this. I do suspect it has more to do with availability- ceccapped cysts sink right to the bottom where hungry neonates can get right at them.

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Hatching out from cysts takes quite a lot of energy (the shells are pretty strong). That energy is beeing passed on if you prevent hatching by feeding cysts instead of hatched naplii.
After Artemia nauplii hatch out, they are very rich in highly unsaturated fatty acids (HUFA). During first 12-24 hours they live on yolk gradually eating it out what makes them less nutritious over time. As they start feeding after second molt they can be enriched again by using apropriate diet.
Some part of assimilated yolk is lost in form of energy needed to keep naplii suspended and this is a reason why they nutritional value drops during first 12-24 hours.
I remember reading some paper stating that nauplii just before they start to feed are about 20% less nutritional than cysts - that 20% is energy used for hatching and motion.

I'll add in here, I have had great luck cultureing "vinegar eels", however, I have never used them for caudates as the jump in water pH that can happen from feeding these to neonates could be an issue.

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Thare is no risk of that just as there is no risk of jump in salinity as result of feeding brine shrimps or they nauplii - good rinse and you are on a safe side

I would never feed flaked fish food to salamanders, would you? Not suitable. The same goes for microworms for larvae. I've gutloaded microworms by enriching their media. It never helped increase the growth rates of newt larvae - they remained very low when compared to other micro foods.

I wouldnt feed flaked fish food to anything. Second thought - maybe to Paramecium culture.

I've never tried to feed amphibians larvae ONLY with microworms as I always have enough Rotifera/Cladocera. I even don't bother any more with brine shrimps - Bosmina is much more suitable for that.

I never noticed a difference between growing rate of fish fry and amphians larvae regardless if I used brine shrimp nauplii (long time ago) or freshwater Rotifera/Cladocera. As I am big fan of diversified diet I always keep a small culture of microworms (3 species) and feed them to fry/larvae as a supplemental food. Unless disaster strikes I never use just one type of food for more than 2 days in a row.

Only on one occasion I was feeding killifish fry with microworms as THE ONLY food for about a week as I had no aquatic food cultures going on and had no brine shrimp cysts left. So, for that week I was feeding fry only with enriched microworms. Didn't see any difference between that fish any other fish I raised before or after.

So, as a summary:
- "it has an amino acid profile that matches that of Artemia", DHA is nearly the same (or better!), while EPA can be easily introduced by adding fish oil to the medium (just like any other HUFA)
- if there was no difference in fish fry raised on "propper" food and raised on microworms I assume there would be no difference for amphibian larvae either. (I cant however rule out that there is tiny chance there would be difference if microworms dont contain some key ingredient for amphibians - only experiment will answer this question)

John said:

I've gutloaded microworms by enriching their media. It never helped increase the growth rates of newt larvae - they remained very low when compared to other micro foods.

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Strange, either maybe there is some ingredient microworms are missing or the reason wasn't nutritional value of microworms ...

Sometimes its a silly little thing. I remember when at some point my alpines refused to eat earthworms. I had no idea what is giong on, I thought mayby its because of earthworms diet, so I changed it few times. It didn't help, but I kept trying to feed earthworms to my alpines. I found why few months after, when they suddenly started to eat earthworms again ... but only some of them. I found they didn't eat specimen from 2 containers - it turned out it was soil - it contained "organic fertilizer" which made the worms taste badly.
Strangely enough, L.vulgaris, T.cristatus and L.montandoni didn't refuse eating cursed earthworms ...

So sallie larvae do as good or better on decapped cysts than hatched artemia?

With microworms, perhaps they do not trigger as good of a feeding response. I've noticed with microworms that if too many settle near the larvae the larvae will get annoyed and start darting around the tank. Brine shrimp aren't as likely to do this. Brine shrimp are also bigger and often move to the larvae so maybe less energy is used eating them.