Raising Zooplankton

so over the past couple months ive been thinking about raising some type of food source for my fish and coral. ive been thinking about starting a phyto culture, and triggerpods. i love soft corals, mainly zoas and palys. And i have a beloved spotted manderin, aka my picky eater. so im looking for something nutritious to help with growth and health of my corals. im not sure what this Zooplankton is, can't find anything about growing this, but i am courious how. My buddy TimtheToolMan does it, but im wondering if anybody has any experience or even info about this process. Plz any info is benificial to me. thanks
 
growing phyto is easy, the gist of it is a 2 liter bottle, stick an airline tubing in it fed by an air pump, surround it with light, and put a starter culture in it say from Tim's stock. make sure it is topped off every couple days and wait a week or so till it gets too dark to see light all the way through. dump half of it into a storage container, refill the rest with more water, and repeat.

see this dandy lil guide - http://www.melevsreef.com/phytoplankton.html
 
The best way to get a manderin to eat frozen food is to train him. You would need a breeders box from FAF or at least a breeders net from the pet store (but it's a pain to keep clean).
Put him in the box and buy some live brine shrimp, feed the brine phyto plankton for 8 hours then feed the Manderin). After a week, start mixing in a bit of shaved frozen mysis and slowly increase the amount of mysis till he is eating whole pieces.
Then you can put him back in the tank.
This is the first step, he may need Marc's Manerin Cafe.
 
I'm trying this out for the 1st time. I'm smelling a seaweedy/green-ish smell from the bubbling bottle is this normal? Its been a couple of days following the MG recipe found online. I seeded the bottle with some DT I bought to feed my tank. Hopefully my batch will be ready when I run out of DT.

What are the symptoms of a crash on the Phtyo? Does it turn a colour other than green, smell?
 
I hope your still on here;

Its not as easy as they make it seem, start with a clean culture of nano (best for rotifers) and make sure you use filtered air and treat the culture water with .4ml's of sodium hypo chlorate per 1/gal and get some sodium thiosulfate from Fl Aqua Farms mix as much as will dissolve in 6oz's of ro water (usually can dissolve a couple of tablespoons over time) you will use this to dechlorinate the sodium hypo (.6ml's per gal).

I light my cultures for 24/7 and split 1/2 every 7 days, I grow 8/gals of phyto to feed my rotis and have to supplement with Roti-Rich or I'll run out.

Some people feed their roti's nothing but Roti-Rich but part of the hobby for me is culturing the phyto, I feed the nano to the rotifers and once a day I dump in the 50ml's of T. Iso and feed my cope-pods Tet since it's a larger animal and better prey size for them.

Phyto has a hard time competing with bacteria and no chance against rotifer infestation so think clean and germ free or you'll end up with a clear culture (rotifers) or a big smelly mess (bacteria).
 
Sunny d. Do you have any pictures of your setup? I would be interested in seeing how you keep everything free from contaminating one another..,
 
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