Breeding Copepods

[Sea Turtle]

Hi everyone,

I just recently started to breed copepods in a seperate tank. (5 gallon about half filled with main tank water.) I bought a jar of Tiger Copepods from my lfs along with a bottle of LIVE Phytoplankton. I also added a small pile of rubble to the corner of the breeding tank for them to hide. My question is, does anyone have any experience with doing this? And if so, what are the results? Will I have mass amounts of pods in a week or two? Am I doing it right, or is there a better way to do it?

The main problem I am having is that I bought a mandarin for my main reef tank (75 gallons with 90 lbs of live rock). Unfortunantly, he is getting really skinny which tells me that he is not eating pods in the tank, or there are no pods im the tank. I did however dump a bottle of the tiger pods into the main tank about two weeks ago, but have not seen any since... I also have been trying to feed him Cyclopeez but he won't eat them!

 

[xxBarneyxx]

for the pods that should work. I would also recommend adding some macro algae to the pod tank as well. Mandarians do live almost totally from pods so any that you put in will be eaten quickly. If you can connect the pod tank to your display tank that would help as well. Then some pods will find their way into the tank as well and it can act as a refugium as a side benefit.

you could also add a brine shrimp breeder to the tank to give a constant supply of brine shrimp to the tank as well (or raise them seperatly and add them to the tank).