Some dry cow patties powdered up and wet thoughouly. And crushed egg shell works great. I use containers of water outside for mosquitos too. Their larvae is good free food.
Interesting! May try my hand at a much smaller scale setup. I can usually collect a bunch of daphnia at local pond as a starter culture. Unsure about green water culture. 🤔 Thanks for sharing.
In this method the daphnia would mainly reproduce by cloning themselves and giving live birth. If conditions become unfavorable for them (which maynot in this situation as he feeding greenwater and doing water changes) they will then produce males and females and they will mate producing egg sacs. Youll see it in females as a tiny dark color pea shaped sac on their back. They would them release them and you can see some floating in water surface but majority would be in the debris in the tub base. Siphon it out using a bbs net and then air dry until completely dry. Store in air tight container to use at later date. Hope this helps.
They say daphnia is easy to breed, but was not so for me. I bought a culture and they died within a week. I kept them in a big bowl without air pump, and fed them regularly. I don't know is it the lack of air pump that killed them
What do you mean algae grow along the filament one, you need to start a new culture? Sorry, I didn’t quite understand what you meant there. Thank you for the education on daphnia.
If you get the long thread like algae, you want to start over. It interferes with their ability to swim easily. If you get it you will know....if not, no need to worry!
Growing Zone 7b. The daphnia barely produce anything second half of december until late February when you have some warm weeks. But they will survive (or at least their eggs do). In summer, it gets so hot that I keep them shaded.
Did you culture for only free floating Alge in your starter? I only ask because when I selected for only the free floating Alge I never got any hairy Alge ever.
Hair algae can appear in daphnia tubs that have been culturing for several months. You only want free floating algae as the hair or string algae can't be used as food for them and they can get entangled/trapped causing them to die.
