Sorry about the wait for a reply. It was a long time ago that I had the daphnia, and they were mainly a fringe benefit from my efforts to collect freshwater fairy shrimp for fish food. A nearby farmer's pasture would flood in this one low area every spring and I noticed as a kid that there were always ducks and herons around this area at that particular time of year. Putting on my rubber boots, I waded out into the water and found a fishkeepers goldmine. The birds were having a feeding frenzy on these shrimp. I went home to get my bucket and net and soon had all the live shrimp I could feed my fish. I would warn anyone who tries to do this to be very careful and be able to identify anything you catch along with these shrimp, there's a lot of critters out there that will eat your fish instead of being food for your fish. In amongst all the other tiny animals were plenty of daphnia, which are also called water fleas. Anyway, back to your question Gabe, I kept them up next to the house where they would get some sun but not all day long to overheat them, the container was actually a clear plexiglass battery container that I got from a friend who worked at a battery factory, any scratched or cracked containers got scrapped out but made great vessels for fishkeeping, and FREE! Didn't use any aeration, as the "pond" that they came from had none, and I tried to make as natural an environment for them as I could.
When I was growing up as a kid, that litle piece of flooded pasture was my little corner of paradise, in addition to catching the shrimp, daphnia, and other live fish foods there, I also saw quite a variety of wildlife, deer, red fox, raccoon, opossum, groundhogs,muskrat, many different kinds of water birds. It was a nice quiet place to "get away" for a while. Unfortunately, it only exists in my memory now. The land has been developed into a golf course.
If you decide to try the powdered milk thing, I would suggest using only a small amount at first, see what happens, my guess would be that if the daphnia don't eat it , it will just get the algae growing that much quicker.
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