I can't get green water to develop!

[GaryE]

I need some green water to feed a daphnia culture set up. Usually, I put a tank out back in the sunshine, give it a shot of miracle grow ferts and wait a few days. In my new house, I have had 2 tanks outside in full sun for 10 days, and nothing has developed. I am not going to use fish to do this, but does anyone have advice on how I can get an 'algae problem' started?

Any secret ingredients?

 

[StevenF]

You need to verify the fertilizer has nitrogen, potassium, calcium, magnesium, phosphate, sulfur, chlorine, iron, Manganese, boron, zinc, copper, molybdenum, and nickel.

Many fertilizers don't include nutrients that are commonly in tap water. So you should no use distilled or RO water. Also miracle grow is designed for gardens were the plants are in soil which also supplies nutrients. Also Algae floats in the air so the containers should be open to the air so that they get inoculated with Algae. Or if you have a sample of green water add that to the container.

Beyond that I cannot say. I have only had it once and I solved it by putting a filtering pad in the filter to remove it.

 

[SomethingsFishy24]

Can you add tank water to the ones you are trying to green up? It should add a lot of fishy goodness without the actual fish. Unless there is something in there that you rather not have in the culture I can't see why you couldn't.

 

[Colin_T]

add some lawn fertiliser and wipe the algae out of a tank and squeeze it into the container.

 

[connorlindeman]

I didn't even add anything to my outdoor 20g pond and I've got a bunch of algae

 

[Lynnzer]

It doesn't happen quickly depending on how the culture was started. it's taken me about 5 weeks to get up to green water stage in my own bottles. How long it'll take for them to clear is beyond me but I'll stick with it and find out.
I imagine you need the infusria for feeding fry. That's why I started my own cultures but I have a fall-back option of using vinegar eels which are dead easy to grow. They are smaller than brine shrimp and a culture just goes on, and on, and on, and ...............
I use a cafetier as the split between the vinegar solution and water is easily controlled and the eels can be siphoned out much easier with no, or very little vinegar that will go into the tank.

 

[GaryE]

My project is to run 2 20 gallon Daphnia cultures, fed from tanks of green water. I have D pulex for outdoors, and D moina for indoors.

Maybe I should stand over the tanks and say "I hope I never get green water". That'll do it.

I tried again with some tank water and ferts.