Flowstate

Thanks to both of you for your help! Lowell’s paramecium culture looks like it will scratch my tinkerer itch so I think I’ll need to give that a go. Also very happy to hear Sera Micron will work! I’ll see if I can find a local store with it in stock to use tomorrow if no infusoria spontaneously appear.

Hey guys, got same day 0 zebra danios I'm currently raising up to dip my toe into the world of breeding. It's been EXTREMELY exciting so far, but I'm starting to get concerned about my food source plans. I had 2 jars with water from 2 separate tanks aging in sunlight mainly to see how quickly algae would grow and if one tank grew faster as an experiment, neither appear to have infusoria. I tried the KFS method of using yeast and squeezing a seasoned sponge filter (I tried 2 separate yeasts, "instant" and "active dry" - two separate gallon jugs) those have been sitting in a windowsill for around 24 hours now, but both appear completely devoid of life. I have collected three mason jars of pond water from the apartment complex pond behind our home, discovered there were ghost shrimp by accidentally scooping some, but only saw daphnia and cyclops. I have been using a wide range of magnification tools up to around 11x zoom, with a 30x zoom magnifier due to arrive tomorrow. I grabbed a third jug of pond water to feed the freshly hatched danios in a panic, but even this jar appears to not have any swimming microorganisms. This evening out of frustration I started another culture. I boiled some baby spinach, added a small amount of yeast, added some pond water which included some form of whispy algae, and added squeezed out sponge filter juice + tank water. Hoping that generates something for me. I guess my question is, are infusoria literally so small I can't see them with flashlights, magnification, and this many samples? Is there something in my water (It is on the soft end and contains chloramine) preventing it from growing? How is it possible that a pond with tons of shrimp, plants, and fish wouldn't have any? I have been looking around but coming up short, I ordered some sera micron that should be here this weekend, and will have to use extremely finely ground egg yolk / flake in the meantime. I also have some short sections of stem plants in each fry tray which hopefully have something growing on them as they came from a seasoned tank. Sorry for the long rant, I'll do a thorough writeup / video diary when I've got this figured out so future folk might get some answers where I came up short. I've been recording almost everything since getting back into the hobby, just haven't thought about what I wanted to edit yet. Thank you so much in advance!