Mr. Saltwater Tank TV Friday Am Quick Tip #87: Come to the Dark Side If You Want to Live
Copepods and Amphipods are your friends. In a previous Friday morning quick tip I talked about how to put more pods back in your tank. In this tip, I’ll show you how to keep more of those pods alive.
Browse the Store! Questions?
Thanks Mark 🙂
Haha i like the light trick. Your the man Marky Mark
Something I tried some time ago was populating the refugium with brine shrimp eggs. As an experiment I wanted to see if I could get a natural reproduction. I did get them to hatch although I have no way of knowing how many I ended up with. I had a dragonet which survived for over a year and a half which I attributed to live fare. What do you think about this. I thought this and recreating a natural food source would make for a good video topic. Since then I started adding live brine shrimp to the tank at night as mentioned in your tip above. The fish live it and noticed a boom of life active when the lights go out that I never realized were in my 125 gallon reef. We never stop learning… Thanks for your videos. I finished your algae handbook as well as the video and although I’ve been doing the reef thing for years you make excellent points. We can never know it all…
Dee
If you want to know what macro inhabitants you have in your tank turn all lights out wait till about 1am and then look at it with a flash light. You will be surprised!
Great video and great tip. Especially like the lighting effects you used. That must have cost a fortune 🙂
Do I spy a cleaner wrasse?
Great tip btw
Jack…I have a cleaner wrasse in the tank. I bought him as he was eating frozen and prepared foods already. He eats like a pig!
i got your message, i have another question, Do you have any advise about culturing photoplankton and feeding it to corals?
I’ve read that using a refugium in a sump to help populate your tank’s pod population is a bad idea. The thinking is that you’ll loose most pods when they travel through the return pump. Do you have any thought’s on this? I figure they might get really dizzy being spun around by the impeller.
I currently have a Tunze Silence Electronic Recirculation Pump 1073.05 as my return pump.
fjrg1979…some pods will get killed in your return pump and some will make it past. Some of the lavae will also make it past and grow up in your tank. Bottom line: growing pods in a refugium in your sump won’t hurt.