Daphnia Culture

[Bruce]

When feeding live foods to fish, I often hear people talk about feeding the culture nutritional foods to make sure the fish are getting good nutrition. I often hear @Cory talk about feeder fish lacking nutrients due to poor diet and health. Would it not make sense then to feed daphnia and other live feeder cultures foods that are nutritionally balanced for fish like quality fish foods and vitachem etc?

[Daniel]

Usually with Daphnia you are feeding them some mixture of brewers' yeast,  spirulina, and etc. or they feeding off of green water. Either way both foods are nutritional for both the Daphnia and and the fish that consume the Daphnia.

Often the term used is gut loading and many people find it useful to get additional nutrition in to their fish.

Daphnia themselves are a form of high quality fish food and vita-chem combined as are many other live foods.

[Bruce]

@Daniel Thank you. I was just wondering if their is a way to gut load them beyond the normal yeast & spirulina feeding. 

[Daniel]

Just now, Bruce said:

@Daniel Thank you. I was just wondering if their is a way to gut load them beyond the normal yeast & spirulina feeding. 

Daphnia are a little picky about what they will eat, so there is that limitation. You could add anything powdered you wanted to to your Daphnia food. Some people add ground up dried peas. I think it is like human diets and asking what is the best food?

Sometimes I feed this to my baby brine shrimp as a form of gut loading.

Selco puts a little fish oil in the baby brine shrimp's gut. It is not really necessary though as ungutloaded baby brine is still awfully darn good.

[Bruce]

Thank you @Daniel you've been super helpful.

[pedrofisk]

Warning I've crashed every Daphnia culture I've fed anything except green water. Make sure to start side cultures when experimenting with food.

[Cory]

One of the oldest methods in books. Is starting your daphnia culture with a "cow Pie" You'd then have nutrients from whatever the cow ate in the water column over time and they are filter feeders. The cow pie is also very high in nitrogen and caused the water to go green.

[James Croney]

I don't feed my daphnia anything, but they are 'in cycle' -- which means (at least to me) that there is tiny little bits of green algae being produced at about the rate the daphnia are eating it. Due to how they grow i get explosions and drops, but it overall follows the amount of food they can get.

Right now its cold for me, so only a few scattered daphnia here and there can be seen. They do like to hide though.

In times where my culture is thinner than I would like, I get a 5 gallon bucket and fill it most of the way with water. Add grass from your yard or any dead grassy-like matter. Ive used dried guppy grass to great success. Stir it up and crunch it up, just a handful of grassy stuff. Put it outside in the sun. Add as many daphnia as you want, ive grown them out from as little as 10 or so. They dont take more than a few weeks to have 1000s of babies.  -- When you start to notice that there are more daphnia, pour some back into your culture tank, keeping some in the bucket. Top off the bucket with water from your main culture. Seems like a bunch of exta effort, but its free food. so... kinda balances out

 

As far as gut loading, when i catch daphnia I often see little green stripes of what I assume is somewhere between daphnia food and daphnia poop. I think that gives some extra 'free nutrients' to the fish when hey eat them.

Edited January 31, 2021 by James Croney