Live Food

[KraKen]

I was wondering if there is any kind of live food that I can breed and raise in my tank so i could have a little food chain and a stabler ecosystem.

does anyone know of anything that would work?

 

[Tolak]

What size tank, and what fish? I've kept livebearers with angels, rarely saw fry.

 

[drewry]

I was wondering if there is any kind of live food that I can breed and raise in my tank so i could have a little food chain and a stabler ecosystem.

does anyone know of anything that would work?

hi

yeah a few years back i had a tank with just dafnia in it
they breed quite well i didnt have any fish in the tank though

 

[KraKen]

It's a 20 gal tank that doesn't have any fish in it at the moment, but I'm getting some tomorrow (it just finished cycling after 4 months )

I'm going to get guppys otos and sparkling guorami initially and once I make or get a new cover I'll get zebra spiny eels, pygmy hatchet fish and shrimp.

Aren't dphnia the same thing as brine shrimp and therefor need salt water?

 

[Scotty001]

Aren't dphnia the same thing as brine shrimp and therefor need salt water?

You can get a brine shrimp hatcher tha hangs inside yout tank, and keeps the salt water seperate from your fresh water,when the lile shrimp have hatched they make their way from the salt water through a passage into the fresh water and into your tank this size brine tho normally fed for small fry.


Artemia Hatcher and feeder kit



How it works



Scott

 

[BigC]

Aren't dphnia the same thing as brine shrimp and therefor need salt water?

No they are totally different.
Daphnia are a freshwater species of water flea along with copepods.
It would be hard to raise a livefood, sustainable fish resource totally within the aquarium. Usually you would have other apparatus to do this. The only one I could think of using is wingless or vestigal winged fruitfly. You would have to construct an easily maintainable breeding chamber with an outlet into the tanks water column and even then I would expect you would have a few escapees.
There are quite a few livefoods you can culture at home if you feel that way inclined such as
Paramecium/Infusorians
Vinegar eels
Microworms
Grindalworms
Whiteworms
Fruitfly
Brineshrimp can be hatched and grown on but it's a bit labourious and needs space for great numbers.
Daphnia and Moina can be cultured in waterbutts but are seasonal.
Again water containers left outside near vegetation will attract flying insect larvae in the summer months.
So you can see there are lots of variations you can feed to your charges other than commercially produced off the shelf foodstuffs.
Regards
BigC