anyone have rotifer culture?

[saltcreepette]

My clownfish laid eggs and depending on if I can scare up some rotifers to culture, I will or wont try to raise the eggs, where are you Larry? :)

[blueboy]

mine just laid eggs this week too! but next day, gone. free fish food!

[gjuarez]

Yeah larry was the person that first came to mind. To raise rotifers you must also have a phytoplankton culture. I am not an expert at this but you need phyto to feed the rotifers.

[Louie3]

I used to be a pro at breeding Micky Mouse Platies, and Black and silver Mollies
But new to the salt water breeding thing

[saltcreepette]

ah yes! I am definitely not prepared enough, no way i could get a greenwater culture and rotifer culture going in four days. oh well. maybe next batch. poor little eggies. you can see their little silver eyes. hard to say no to hundreds of tiny little clownfish baby eyes. :'(

[Instar]

Hey Saltcreepette, how are you? Wait till around the 5th spawn or so before attempting to capture and raise them. Its not likely to work out with the first few spawns cause they don't start out as very good parents normally. You can make records now and record the spawn date, hatch date and numbers the make it to hatch approximately. By the 4th spawn you should be able to predict the % of infertile eggs, the hatch night (probably the 7th to 9th night) after they are laid and the successful hatch percent. And if you really intend to raise them, get the tanks and equipment ready now and start practicing keeping all the cultures alive for more than a couple days. Get all the air stones running and have your battery backups operating. You have to be able to sustain the cultures and hatch brine with reliablilty like clock work every time, even if the lights go out. The time to do all this is not the night of the hatch.

[saltcreepette]

hi larry! good idea. also a question. part of my decision in doing this is how much space the cultures and rearing tanks will take up. any rough estimates? I have a small house. and is there any of it i could do in the garage/patio? thanks.

[jrhein]

Must be the season... I got two clowns from Larry about four years ago. Maroons are so agressive and I was so nervous while trying to pair them up. They continued to destroy each others fins and gill plates. After seperating them multiple times and now back together they finally paired up somewhere around two and a half years ago. They now have eggs right outside the rose anemone. They have been there for six days now and you can see what looks like the eye.

[GaryP]

Here is a pretty good website for how to set up a zoo/phytoplankton culture set up in 2 liter coke bottles. Click on the navigation bar on the right and go to the culture pages.

http://www.sjwilson.net/reef/

[saltcreepette]

yeah larry brought me a cute little guy to try to pair up with my female gsm and she ate his lunch despite my efforts to introduce gradually and give him hiding spaces. Larry might be interested to know that a four stripe damsel is now living with the She-witch currently. They clearly hate each other but there is mutual respect. The damsel is now almost as big as she is!