# collecting and isolating live foods



## Auban (Aug 8, 2010)

so, has anyone ever wondered where their live food cultures come from? those grindal worms didnt just pop up in a culture container somewhere. neither did those daphnia that you feed your baby fish.

even brine shrimp were, at one point, just another uncultivated oddity. so how does one start a new culture of live somethings that the pet trade may have never even heard of before?

as it turns out, it isnt that complicated. in fact, if you are just looking for something that might make a good live food someday without setting a specific requirement on what you might need or use, it doesnt even require any special work at all.

there are two ways of creating a new live food culture. one is finding a particular species wee beastie that you want to use for live food and learning how to grow it. for the this type pioneering work, you would need to learn as much as you can about the species in question and try to recreat ideal conditions for it to reproduce in. this is most people culture live foods, they aquire a culture that they want after or immediately before they do the research on how to keep it. keeping the culture alive is just a matter of giving it the right environment.

the second method is my personal favorite. it involves collecting several different species, giving them a specific environment, and seeing which species prefers that environment. this allows you to create a culture that is curtailed to the growing conditions that you are prepared to give them. the only down side is that you dont know if you are going to get something you will want. you may end up culturing millions of a small waterbug that would be great for adult fish, but would eat your 10 day old betta fry you are trying to feed. for this reason, you should only create such a culture purely for the sake of creating a genuinely new culture. my experience has been that you will eventually find a use/need for whatever you manage to end up with.

years ago, i used to go looking for specific bugs, collecting individuals from the wild and then learning as much as i could about culturing them. sometimes i was succeed, more often than not i would fail. after a while, i got tired of going back to the swamps/ponds/roadside ditches to collect more and more, so i just filled a couple five gallon buckets with water and mud from the bottom and poured them in a ten gallon tank. after i let it settle, i planned on using it as a little refuge to pull specimens from that i could work with.

it didnt take long for the initial "wild stock" to change. at first, i had worms, ostracods, copepods, and one or two daphnia. three weeks later, there were no more woms or daphnia, but the ostracods and copepods had trippled in numbers. i started isolating cultures of both, creating new tanks to put them in. the copepods would not survive a fast change in water quality but the ostracods did fine. eventually i learned how to culture both of them. after several trials and error, i learned that the ostracods could eat detritous, but the larvae would starve if the water column was too clean. the adults did not need suspended food matter food matter, but seemed to benefit if i gave it to them. all of the cultures flourished if i fed them some detritous and something that would stay in the water column.

i was 12 when i started the origional tank of pond water and mud. i was trying to learn how to culture those tiny little worms i would often find in the mud, but instead i ended up learning how to culture something that proved just as usefull to me that i hadnt even considered before. the things i learned from that first tank have allowed me to culture other species of ostracods in large enough numbers to easily use them as live foods. i also learned a lot about culturing copepods, but i never found a need for them since i was able to use ostracod eggs to produce live nauplii on demand that could fill the same role copepods would.

anytime we take somthing from outside, we are changing its environment. even if you were to leave the tank outside, you would still change the temp, circulation, ecology, etc of its occupants. this is one of the reasons i love this method so much. you never know what you are going to end up with, but you will know that whatever takes off can live and reproduce in the environment that you just gave it. that means a lof of the guess work is takien out of the equation. just keep doing what you are doing and you will at worst have enough specimens to attemt cultures on, and at best, have something that flourishes right at the get go.

in order for something to be usefull as live food, you have be able to produce it in large enough quantities to reqularly feed them off. so if you create a tank of water pulled from a wild source, and a month later you have a rediculous number of some crazy little bug, you already know that it can meet the reproduction requirements of live food.

my latest culture came from using this method. i wanted to get a culture of something that could be used as live food, but i wanted to be able to culture it in containers i left outside in the sun. so about a month and a half ago i was on my way to my inlaws house and i saw a small dry creek bed along thier half mile long drive way. about twice a year the creek flows for a couple weeks, so i figured it would be a perfect place to go try and collect my newest live food culture. after walking for about half a mile down the creekbed, i found a tiny puddle of water. i scooped up a bunch of sand and dead leaves, water, and clay and put them in an empty water bottle. when i looked at it, i saw thousands of tiny mosquito larvae, tiny scuds, and large copepods. after leaving it in a shallow cooler full of rainwater outside for a month, i checked on it and found a small daphnid, many small green ostracods, and thousands of small worms, about the size of grindal worms. when i started bringing in small cultures of the outside culture to gow the worms, the daphnids exploded. they went from barely beeing visible at all to producing a cloud that you cant see through(at least when they are feeding up near the light) in less than a week.

i origionally intended to culture the ostracods or the small scuds, and then the worms, but found something that will likely work great for feeding fry.

like i said, you never really know what you will get untill you try it.


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## Auban (Aug 8, 2010)

ostracod culture
partial ostracod harvest video by sjveck - Photobucket


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## Auban (Aug 8, 2010)

here is a video of the daphnids that took off when i brought the culture in. the culture is a lot more dense now than it was then, but you can still see what they are.
small daphnid day 4 video by sjveck - Photobucket


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## Auban (Aug 8, 2010)

here is a video of the small worms i was trying to propogate when i brought the small culture inside. they have exploded in numbers as well, and when i turned the lights off, they started congregating at the top corners of the tank. i have seen them do this over the last several days, but not in this large a quantitiy yet. i stirred the water up to see if there were still more in the detritous, and there are. it seems they like the same conditions that the daphnids do. probably some kind of dero worm. whatever they are, i think i have enough now to start a seperate culture of them. ill leave the daphnids with them since they seem to be doing well in their presence.
IMG_0738.mp4 video by sjveck - Photobucket


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## Auban (Aug 8, 2010)

i fed the worms powdered chlorella algae. after it settled, i came back and could already see their bellies showing green from eating the algae. ill see how they do on that. this could be another way to convert detritous into fish food... exciting


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## navigator black (Jan 3, 2012)

I really like what you are doing here, and this is a really interesting read. Thanks.


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## Auban (Aug 8, 2010)

after doing some digging, it turns out that i have a culture of daphnids and microflex/dero worms. it seems this is a symbiotic culture that a lot of aquarists are having a lot of success with, and therefore is getting to be highly sought out. its funny that i managed to get the same culture by simply scooping up some mud and water and putting it in a tub in the sun.


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## Auban (Aug 8, 2010)

one of my cheapo methods for feeding my live food cultures. 

weekly trimmings from my display tank









slurry gets strained with the coffe filter, solids go to earthworms and liquids go to various pelagic live food cultures and dero worms.


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## Auban (Aug 8, 2010)

update on my daphnia and dero worms:

a few days ago i decided to add some heat and see how the worms do. then i went into the field for an over night guard duty, and directed my wife to feed them. the amount i directed her to feed was too much. when i came back, there had been a large die off. daphnia littered the bottom, with only a hand full left alive. the worms seemed to become much more active though, and it seemed they were a little larger than i had seen them before. 

anyway, i thought the daphnia culture would crash because of poor water quality, but the next day the water was nearly clear again. i looked closely this morning and found that every surface in the tank was completely covered in vorticella. it seems they are the ones that cleared the water. the daphnia are doing better as well, i see lots and lots of little babies swimming around. 

i not sure if i should do anything about the vorticella. when they are anchored, they compete with the daphnia for food, but when they are free swimming, they become food. watching the dero worms crawling across the glass, it is apparent that the vorticella is serving as food for the worms. it seems that this culture is starting to self regulate. when the tank is overfed, the vorticella take over and clear the water, and then the dero worms eat the vorticella. when the dero worms start munching on them, they start detatching from the tank walls and swim through the water column, where the daphnia can pick them up. at the bottom of the tank, a healthy colony of non-seasonal ostracods are constantly sifting through the mulm for anything edible that falls from the water column.

so, the vorticella are starting to decline as the dero worms and the daphnia increase, and the vorticella will be there to quickly clear a tank if i overfeed them again.
im really starting to love the ecology of this tank.


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## Wuwuwu54 (Aug 8, 2012)

i know this is an old thread, but this is awesome. I am thinking about doing this with lake water. This satisfies 2 of my hobbies, microbiology/culturing and fishkeeping! score!


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