daphnia notes

["Daniel McMonigle" <Mcdaphnia at msn_com>]

Bill: "I get about 1/2 teaspoon of drained
daphnia per tub.   If I provided more inputs I'd get more daphnia, but two
tubs give me all that I need.  Plus more inputs = more mess =  more cleaning.
I get about 4 months out of a tug before I have to tear it down and start
anew."
  
It should be easy to harvest nearly a cup of drained daphnia a day from a 35 gallon culture with little maintenance effort.Siphoning out 20 to 75% of the culture water once or twice a day should reduce the frequency of tear-down.

"Daniel warns of some of the dangers of feeding yeast.  It's important not to
overfeed, particularly when a culture is getting started.  Yeast is alive and
reproduces, and too much can crowd out the daphnia.  If you use the soy flour
food, note that you mix only 2 tsp of yeast with 1 cup of flour, and then use
only 1/4 tsp of that mixture in a cup of water for a tub.  You can increase
that if the water clears too soon."
  
I would suggest feeding more often over increasing the amount of food, unless the water clears in less than a hour.

"Most people say that daphnia need hard, alkaline water."
  
Those are the people with daphnia strains that need hard alkaline water. Most strains fit that category, but I have had one that came with tadpole shrimp that prospered in distilled water.  
  
"By the way, it's probably not the best thing to feed only daphnia to your
bettas.  Supplementing that with a good flake food would be a good thing.
Or, since bettas like to feed on the surface, perhaps wingless fruit flies
might be useful.  These are available from several on-line sources, and are
easy to culture."
  
I would suggest newly hatched baby brine shrimp for the best synergy with feeding daphnia. With bettas I would also suggest using the daphnia as a backup and culturing Moina  primarily. It's much smaller than even baby brine shrimp, so the baby bettas can be taken off "infusoria" much sooner. I wouldn't abandon the daphnia because Moina  crashes too easily to be 100% dependable. The mix of rotifers and ciliates in an infusoria culture is fine, but it fills the size gap between the ciliates and the baby brine shrimp. I have fed baby bettas with nothing but daphnia once they are big enough, but I agree with the theory that a variety of foods is better, I just don't always practice it when I have one food in great quantity.

P.S. Nice Daphnia site here: http://www.cladocera.uoguelph.ca/about/
  


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