Re: [Killietalk] re: food for daphnia (was: spinach in a blender for daphnia food?`)

["Doug Dame" <dameda at shands_ufl.edu>]

"Scott Davis" <unclescott at prodigy_net> Saturday, May 08, 2004 1:32:44
AM provided a long list of daphnia foods and/or growing concoctions .


My sporadic efforts at mass-production of green water have never worked
consistently. This is definitely a problem with the cook, not the
recipe, but the bottom-line is still it hasn't work well for me. Or more
importantly, for my daphnia.

Lately I've been using primarily A.P.R. ("Artificial Plankton and
Rotifer") with the best results I've ever had. Might not be the best
results YOU"VE ever had, of course, but I have to put these kind of
things in time/cost/benefit matrix of my own personal experiences. I'm
starting off from a ... how should I put this delicately... a low base
of success. Yes, that's it... a low base. Anyway ...

I found the APR on my shelf, I'd picked up a coffee-can sized can (is
that redundant?) on a visit to the Florida Tropical Fish Farms
Association store (Gibsonton FL) six months ago and forgotten about it.
(Since this is not an item you're likely to see at your average LFS, I
don't think it's particularly out of line to mention that the current
non-member FTFFA price is still the $14 I paid for a can that's listed
as 300 grams.) It's a very fine soft yellow powder that makes me think
of pulverized dried egg yolk.

I typically sprinkle a bit of APR into the daphnia containers nightly,
and in the morning before I go to work sometimes, and give it a swirl to
mix it in, and voila, seemingly vibrant daphnia cultures. At the moment
I'm striving for consistent easy production rather than maximum tonnage,
so I'm probably under-feeding. But unlike my earlier efforts with
straight yeast as primary feed, with APR I haven't yet had any rapid
crashes. ("Yet" possibly being the key word.)

I tend to use old "mosquito water" (water in an outdoor bucket that's
been primed with a few pieces of dry dog food to feed bacteria) as the
starter water for the daphnia cultures, so the initial water has a
pre-load of small living stuff before I start adding in the daphnia and
APR. When I had an outdoor daphnia pond, it stayed remarkably
mosquito-free (until it crashed), so I believe that daphnia will happily
consume newly hatched mosquito larva, which are vanishingly small, that
might inadvertently be in the mosquito water. Don't know if that
bacteria pre-load of my water is really a necessary or useful supplement
to the main APR foodstuff, guess someday I could experiment some on
that. And top-off water for the daphnia cultures comes from
water-changes of the fish tanks.

Like everything, this is an approach in constant evolutionary mode.
YMMV !!!

HTH

Doug Dame
Yankeetown FL



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