Re: [GSAS-Member] More live food cultures?

["Betty Goetz" <haika@drizzle.com>]

I don't tend to need to feed the cultures, but I do have a whitecloud
mountain minnow 'pond' that tends to be green most of the time, so if the
daphnia cultures look like they need to be fed I do dip some green water
for them. I've had the best luck keeping reasonable numbers of daphnia
going using children's wading ponds, but right now those are dedicated to
my geese and get emptied several times per week. I need to find a place
that's a non-poultry area to put a wading pond at this new place. Right
now I'm running on 5 gallon buckets and those rope-handled things (what do
you call them????). I also toss in bits of cuttlebone in my daphnia
cultures. Read that someplace and it doesn't seem to hurt.

In the past I've used sweet potato baby food (read that on-line somewhere)
to feed my cultures also, but that tended to set up a boom-bust cycle
eventually. I guess I never learned how to feed in small enough doses to
just keep something going all the time. Green water works better for me in
that regard.

I also tend to get bloodworms in my daphnia cultures which isn't an awful
thing. I don't tend to get mosquito larvae in healthy daphnia cultures.
Wonder if the daphnia catch the newly hatched mosquito larvae and eat
them????? I just can't do the indoor white creepy worm cultures. I tried
microworms a couple times but just got too grossed out. Never got past the
gag reflex (weak grin). OK...everyone has SOMETHING that creeps them
out...sqirmy white worm things that look like parasites in my creep-out
thing.

Betty Goetz

> Thanks for the advice-- I do have some buckets set up outside to catch
> rainwater for the garden that I had moved some of the daphnia to, but
> apparently they didn't make it...I'd left them massively overcrowded
> overnight, so maybe I had set up the entire group to crash prior to
> splitting them all up.
>
> Do you ever have to add anything for them, or do they seem to be able to
> feed on whatever grows in your buckets?
>
>
>>> daphnia-- also killed off in record time
>>
>> I've found that if I have 3-4 cultures going OUTSIDE, that I tend to be
>> able to keep some daphnia available at all times. These are all in 5
>> gallon buckets and those 15-18 (??) gallon rope handle plastic
>> containers
>> I found at Home Depot. When I try smaller containers, I get more of a
>> boom-bust cycle going.
>>
>> Betty Goetz
>>
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