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Re: Daphnia web sites & their myths



Hi John,

I just looked through that list of sites and though I didn't find anything
new, I did find some things that bothered me - I hate it when sites that
claim to be reliable and informative tell people how to look after
daphnia or about their biology and the information is crazy. Commerical
sites seem to be particularly guilty of this. For example Daelco claim
that getting ephippia is the end of the world and that they'll never hatch
unless frozen and thawed and/or heated up repeatedly. This really annoys
me because it's just plain garbage. I've found that most of the embyros in
ephippia will hatch within a 10 days if kept at around 72F in good daphnia
water. This goes for magna and pulex (my two favourites). A certain
proportion of the embryos take a lot longer to hatch and my guess is these
are the ones which are triggered by freeze/thaw. This kind of information
leads to people just throwing out a dead culture for no good reason.
There were other foolish bits of advice amongst those sites (the main one
that comes to mind was the no-water change advice on one of the commercial
sites). Another site claimed that ephippia production had nothing to do
with the presence of male daphnia. I often wonder how people think up this
stuff :).

John


On Wed, 14 Oct 1998, Live Foods Digest wrote:

> Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 07:23:20 -0400
> From: "John M. Burns" <jmburns at pressroom_com>
> Subject: Interesting Daphnia sites (current on 10/13/98)
> 
> Since everyone's into daphnia these days....   Below are some interesting
> daphnia sites (all good as of 10/13/98).  Many also discuss other live
> foods.  Enjoy.
> 
> - --John

---

"Language has not the power to speak what love indites:
 The soul lies buried in the ink that writes." 

  eirinn at valhalla_com  (http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~jpc)