Re: Green Water and mosquitos

["Scott Davis" <unclescott at prodigy_net>]

David,

Would it be possible to plunk your greenwater in a well lighted bowl (maybe
a 3 gallon one picked up in a garage sale - let's not spend too much of your
money.) Let it sit a couple of days under a light or near a window. Then
toss it through a brine shrimp net (or better a brine shrimp sieve by
Nuovo). The mossies left from the first sieving would have grown and should
be easier to remove.

Of course sometimes greenwater crashes in such a situation and falls out of
the water column to carpet the bottom of the container. (Bummer)

Sometime I'm going to buy some of Mike Reed's frozen algae paste and try it
with daphnia cultures. (Probably have to use a large tank and water/paste
movement via hard airline tubing.)

Another thought on the greenwater/daphnia cultures. At odd moments a most
desired killie fry will appear when there is no time to care for it all by
itself. It may be tossed into a daphnia culture to eat what the daphnia are
eating until it can work it's way up through the smaller daphnia. In time it
can be removed to eat more conventional foods.

If you had an easily identified killie whose fry you could gently release in
the daphnia/greenwater, the killies would go for the mossies first. (Make
sure it is something like your one Aplocheilus strain in a fundulopanchax
room to avoid later accidents.)

On the other hand, if you have mossies hatching out of indoor daphnia
cultures, you must be bringing in prodigious numbers of mosquitos. Daphnia,
being the opportunistic filter feeders which they are - taking everything
from bacteria to newly hatched brine shrimp - will filter out a lot of
newborn mossies. My daphnia cultures outside are dense enough that only the
rare mosquito larvae survives to get big enough to be seen. This despite the
presence of mossie egg rafts on the culture surfaces! Therefore hundreds of
mosquito larvae are being consumer for every individual which survives the
predation.

All the best!

Scott


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