Wow, such an interesting and lengthy thread!
Hi all, I'm new to the forum and found this thread during my quest to find as much information about culturing moina.
So far, I've read a lot of differing techniques, successes and failures in this thread and I'm hoping it keeps going.
At present, I live in Brisbane and have been trying to culture moina. Last year I purchased some eggs from ebay from a seller in Thailand. It seemed to work well, but typically, I found the population to grow and then crash. I'm raising them in a couple 25 litre buckets outside (shaded for most of the day) and they seem to be ok with the weather here, luckily. I'm raising them using a yeast slurry.
The population remained fairly low (with a few mild fluctuations), so I went on a five week overseas holiday last September. I came back and there were still some swimming around, but by now there was a large amount of algae growing on the sides of the bucket. I hadn't really looked after it much until someone else here in Brisbane contacted me through another aquarium-related forum, asking me if my quest for daphnia was going well, as he was after some as well (note: daphnia seem to be very difficult to find here in Australia, both naturally and through other hobbyists). I told him that I had some moina, so I'd try growing them again. I put a bit of yeast in the water, but not much happened. After a few weeks, I went to check on the bucket and found the population had got really large. Great! I thought it was time to start splitting the culture so that total population crashes can be avoided.
Now, this is where things got strange. I had a small glass aquarium inside that was probably about 10 litres in size. I used to have a crayfish in there, but for months the water had just sat there. I sucked up a bunch of the original moina and put them into the little glass aquarium, thinking that it would be a great container to keep another population. BUT, within two hours, ALL OF THEM HAD DIED! I have no idea why. Luckily, I still had the original population, but the numbers went down considerably.
Anyway, I was still eventually able to get a starter culture to the other guy, but we're both trying to put our heads together to figure out how to raise moina so that other hobbyists can be supplied with some for their fish. WE're trying a few different techniques with feeding, such as seeing how yeast vs. spirillina vs a mixture of the two works.
However, splitting populations seems to be difficult for me. I had another aquarium (30-40 litres) inside that had a lot of aged water and a lot of algae growing in it (as well as the 10 l one), so I thought I would try it again. This time, I cleaned out the 10 lt one and filled it with water from my fish pond (and some yeast) . Again, a 100% mortality rate was the result within 24 hours. For the life of me, I can't figure out what could be the problem.
So, hopefully I can get some more great tips and suggestions here from everyone!
One of the things I'm going to try is to use manures to try to start new populations. I can get horse manure around here, but I'm worried about any of the medications coming out in the manure (ie worming medication) and affecting the water. However, I've recently read a scientific paper that compared the various manures and it found that vermicompost (ie worm manure) seemed to work the best. I happen to have a small worm farm, so I took a risk and seeded a 1 litre bottle with it. A week has gone by and I haven't seemed to kill the population, so fingers crossed!
Anyway, sorry for the long and drawn out story. I'm searching for as much advice as I can get and this thread seems to be a great source. I'm hoping to get a few more populations started, but getting them going seems to be the tricky part.
My longterm goal is to actually get a good supply of resting eggs on hand just in case a whole population crashes. Actually collecting and storing ephippia is where I'm having a hard time getting information, so if anyone has any tips on how I can collect the resting eggs, that would be GREATLY appreciated! I'm well aware of the lifecycle and how adverse conditions stimulate the production of ephippia, but how are they collected and stored?
Thanks for reading my rant, and I'm hoping to hear from people some time in the future. Once I get some sort of experiment set up, I can post the results here if anyone is interested.
Best regards,
DiverDoug
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