Algae Paste, Yeast Based, or live phytop?

[thewire]

I need to find a frugal way to feed the rotifier and most important reduced labor and space. After been reading a couple forums and articles, here are the 3 options to feed the rotifier:

 

1) Culturing your own phytoplankton by buying the nano culture kits from Florida Aqua Farm

 

2) Using Algae Paste from who??

 

3) Feeding roti with yeast based product - like bakery yeast (add selco 12 hours prior to feeding roti to larvas)

 

I am more interested in the option 2 and 3. If I purchased a (let say 1L of the algae paste such as Rotiplus), can i break it into portions and have it frozen in the freezer for up to a year?

As for the yeast based product, how do you do it?

[dave w]

I need to find a frugal way to feed the rotifier and most important reduced labor and space. After been reading a couple forums and articles, here are the 3 options to feed the rotifier:

 

1) Culturing your own phytoplankton by buying the nano culture kits from Florida Aqua Farm

 

2) Using Algae Paste from who??

 

3) Feeding roti with yeast based product - like bakery yeast (add selco 12 hours prior to feeding roti to larvas)

 

I am more interested in the option 2 and 3. If I purchased a (let say 1L of the algae paste such as Rotiplus), can i break it into portions and have it frozen in the freezer for up to a year?

As for the yeast based product, how do you do it?

 

What is your goal? I'd say the most frugal way would be to feed either the algae paste or the yeast based product. Live phytoplankton culture is much more complicated than the other two. The fast growing microalgaes are not hard, but much more complicated in comparison. But they are also a much higher quality product and a necessity if you are trying to raise larvae. If you are feeding rotifers to your tank in general, the quality of live microalage is not as important. Reed mariculture, Algagen are just two sources of algal paste, I haven't used their products but hear good things about them.

 

The standard is to raise rotifers any way you can then enrich them just prior to feeding to your target organism. So yeast or paste cultures are fine, you can even use a combination. A little more important than the type of food is the attention to water quality, although rotifers are fairly tolerant of lower quality water they have their limit and your culture will crash. So light regular feeding to preserve water quality is more important than the type of food, in my experience. You will quickly get the hands on experience to feeding with yeast until the water turns slightly cloudy and then waiting until it clears before feeding again. It varies a lot depending on your rotifer density, water quality, filtration and concentration of the yeast food. They have directions on the bottle, or there are many internet sources. In my opinion the best book source is from Frank Hoff and Terry Snell called the "Plankton Culture Manual", it has been through a dozen editions. The book is a little technical but was written for the hobbyist, just it was not edited well and can be a little difficult to read at some points.

 

Rotifer culture is so easy you can one of the early editions used on Amazon for very cheap and still learn all you need to know about rotifers. The info has been around for decades. A famous breeder named Martin Moe successfully raised rotifers in V-8 vegetable juice. So they will can eat many things of the right size and nutritive quality.

 

Hope that helps.

Edited July 24, 2011 by dave w