Phyto and shrimp

[hypertech]

I'm thinking about providing my tank live food. If I could setup a couple small tanks in the back room which would grow out brine or mysid shrimp or something to feed them, it might keep them better fed and my tank cleaner.

So can someone point me in the right direction? If this is an expensive, time consuming, or high maintenance venture, I'll skip it.

[garfield]

Matt
talk to Kate "kbb0118" she used to do green algeas and rotifer, she can tell you more about that :biggrin:

[Hellaenergy]

I'm growing Phyto Plankton based on this article:

http://www.melevsreef.com/phytosteps.html

I found it to be very informative.

[Chad Vossen]

super easy.

i used to grow out brine shrimp and copepods in my window. if you can get the live phytoplankton and the fertilizers, culture your own phyto. get a feel for it. then add hatched baby brine shrimp, wait two or 3 weeks and you'll have a ton of adults. i would rinse the cultures every week or two through a plastic coffee filter to do water changes and add them to clean phyto cultures.

you can and probably will contaminate the phyto with copepods from the tank, let me tell you... those pods will go nuts and you'll be supplying the rest of us with pods at meetings.

the pods and brine shrimp are not able to consume the phyto fast enough to run out of food. when i was culturing phyto in 2.5 gallon clear jugs, the pods and brine shrimp were more of an accident.