Phytoplankton

[Donya]

I have my Clibanarius vittatus hermits in an air-pump & LR only setup. To give my hermits a treat recently, I gave them some fresh seaweed to snack on that was collected from a local beach. At that time I obviously introduced some local fauna to the tank (no big deal there and saw it comming), but phyto was a bit of a surprise. The tank is a delicious green currently an stable as it's ever been as far as 0s on all the bad stuff and a rock steady pH of 8.2. The tank has plenty of LR, an overkill lamp that's on for extended hours, and a crazy amount of air being pumped into it for good surface aggitation, so it seems like a good environment for growing phyto. I'd like to keep it going, since it means if/when I get my various hermit species to spawn again (have had 2 species spawn regularly, but bad luck with feeding the larvae each time), the offspring will have a better chance of surviving the larval stage since food will be mroe abundant and easier to provide. I have two main questions:

First, is there anything special/inobvious that has to be done to ensure that a phyto culture keeps going, and if ferts & such are needed, are they safe to use given that this is a tank with inverts? I have read conflicting info on culturing methods, and in the past I've only seen it just pop up without warning and leave the next day equally fast. The only thing I've seen consistently from various sources is that cultures tend to "crash" easily after short peridos fo time, which I want to avoid. This new stuff has been going for a few weeks now and rebounds after each water change. I don't know if there are any trace elements that could cause problems if they get used up; I've been hoping the weekly partial changes would do the trick for trace elements but wasn't sure how fast stuff gets gobbled up by phyto.

Also, what is the best method to preserve this stuff in a fridge/freezer if I want to keep a backup supply for feeding in case of a culture crash? I've read of just sticking it in the fridge, but IME it doesn't keep very well that way compared to some frozen concentrated stuff I used to have.

 

[xxBarneyxx]

I honestly cant help but maybe doing something as simple as using fish food or something like marine snow in the containers you are culturing it in would provide enough nitrate/phosphate, etc as it broke down to keep it going.

Its a pure guess but I would think that the trace elements in sea water are not going to be a problem. You could try dosing small amounts of potassium nitrate and potassium phosphate (though not into any tank that has marine critters in it). Most premade aquatic plant ferts contain trace elements as well so could be dodgy for using these in marine tank (not sure if they contain copper or not). You can just buy the ferts separately though and i imagine (again just a guess) that phytoplankton would not be particularly fussy about where its getting its energy from (so just dosing nitrate and phosphate would probably keep them going). This is pure speculation on my part though and assumes that phytoplankton is similar to algae and some plants in what it needs.

 

[Colin_T]

Phytoplankton cultures crash for a couple of reasons. The most common one is lack of food, followed by lack of CO2 or too much CO2. The lack of CO2 is more of a problem in a thick culture, the algae suck it up and release oxygen and if there isn't enough surface turbulence then the algae can starve from lack of the CO2 and then die. If the lights are turned off and there isn't enough surface turbulence then the algae can suffer from lack of oxygen. They use CO2 when they have light, but use oxygen in the dark. Lots of aeration will help prevent either of these problems.

Phytoplankton cultures use heaps of nutrients and when a culture gets going it can literally suck everything (nutrient wise) out of the water. When it runs out of nutrients it will often crash. Adding a daily dose of nutrients will help keep a culture going for longer. Any sort of plant food can be used including lawn fertiliser or aquarium plant fertiliser. Because you have hermit crabs in the tank I would suggest an aquarium plant food like Sera Florena or something similar. Add this everyday.

Putting cultures in the fridge doesn't work, neither does freezing them. You need to start a new culture each week or so in case the old one crashes.

You should be careful about having the culture in with the hermit crabs because if it does crash, it could kill the crabs via ammonia poisoning, caused by the break down of the algae.

 

[Donya]

Lack of CO2/O2 won't be a problem in this tank; as mentioned, it's got a crazy amount of air being pumped into it. When I've run into problems with CO2/O2 problems in the past, pH was one of the first things I saw going weird at night, but i've checked it and it holds steady, so I figure the gas transfer that's going on right now is sufficient to keep everything ballanced.

Putting cultures in the fridge doesn't work, neither does freezing them. You need to start a new culture each week or so in case the old one crashes.

I wasn't meaning to store it for starting new cultures, but rather thinking in terms of the bottles of stuff in gel or other solution that keep for ages. The frozen stuff I used to get was in little soap-bottle-like dispesners, really concentrated, and cost over $20 a pop but it was really useful for feeding some of my critters and one bottle would last for months, as well as not risk establishing phyto where I didn't want it. Being a cheapskate if I can make my own reserves of stuff like that, I'd like to lol. For the moment I'll try keeping a bucket of the stuff spare until I can get a better backup system in place. The setups I've seen so far for phyto culturing seemed like a bit of a space hog, but they looked cheap enough to put together with soda bottles and the like.

Any sort of plant food can be used including lawn fertiliser or aquarium plant fertiliser. Because you have hermit crabs in the tank I would suggest an aquarium plant food like Sera Florena or something similar. Add this everyday.

You could try dosing small amounts of potassium nitrate and potassium phosphate (though not into any tank that has marine critters in it).

Thanks for the recommendations guys I'll look into those. The copper point is a good one, and I hadn't thought about that; I'll be sure to look for that on the ingredients list (if it's used I'd think it'd show up on the list, or so I'd hope), and definitely will do the tests with addatives in another container with no animals first. Somewhere sitting around I've got some dical phosphate, but dont' have anything sitting around that would cover nitrates (other than old tank water but the NO3 is even pretty low in that).

You should be careful about having the culture in with the hermit crabs because if it does crash, it could kill the crabs via ammonia poisoning, caused by the break down of the algae.

I've had phyto blooms and sudden dieoffs in similar setups in the past, and those unintentional cultures were easily as dense as what I've got right now. One tank even had a fish in it and some finicky snail species, but nothing bad happened other than me having to do a partial WC to be able to see my critters again. I won't be chancing other animals in this current tank though; it's just the hermits, which like to sit in pretty awful stinking pools of water in the wild while snacking on dead fish/crabs/other stuff, so I doubt they're at much risk if my phyto decides to crash before I get other stuff set up. O2 deprivation is the bigger issue I've seen from past phyto blooms, but that was again taken care of when I started adding air pumps to my tanks.

That said though, I'm currently looking into a bigger setup to move my hermits to so they can have more stomping space; the new rock is almost ready for that, I just need to clear out some space to put the new setup. If the aquarium fertilizer thing does the trick, then I'll be running an animal-less system anyway with the hermits moved out, and can just dump some fresh phyto into other tanks whenever I get hermit babies next.

 

[xxBarneyxx]

You can get pot. Nitrate (dry) from any decent aquatics retailer that deals with planted tanks. Shame your not in the UK because I could give you a few places you could get it from (and I still have a ton of the stuff sitting around from when I had a planted tank ).

Make sure you let us know how it goes, would be particularly interested in seeing how much phosphate/nitrate it is capable of absorbing as it could be an interesting filtration method.

 

[Donya]

Arg...lovely life and expensive car troubles ( ) saw to it that I've had a very hard time getting much of anything done setup-wise, what with the need to go places to get things to do any sort of additional setup lol. I started a test the day after my last post in this thread taking some ~0.5L samples in cleaned out soda bottles. One went in the fridge, capped (with the cap removed daily for a bit and then replaced to at least get a tiney bit of gas exchange), the other was left open-topped with light at room temperature (~65-70F). I ran both samples through filters to get rid of debris and any little buggy things that might decay/die, so it's just green water in each bottle. In the just under 2 weeks those have been sitting, I've seen almost no dieoff from either bottle. Growth was hindered obviously; none evident in the fridge one, very little in the one at room temp although it has darkened just a tad. There's no air being pumped into either container of course; I'm going to keep watching those bottles to see how long the cultuers can hang on in poor conditions. Once I get my act together and get something to dose phosphate/nitrate I'll do something similar with some more samples.

 

[Donya]

I've had some trouble moving the hermits without moving phyto...looks like I can't have any water contamination if I want a phyto-free hermit tank that's getting good light.

Unfortunatelly, a cold-ish snap almost killed my tank culture, although not because the phyto can't tollerate cold temperatures. It's survived just fine at fridge temperatures. Instead I've got some weird, soft, feathery type of hair algae that started growing and overtaking the phyto as soon as the ambient air temp dipped into the 60s. The tank is unheated, so I guess this is some colder-water local algae I picked up somehow. At least the hermits think it's tastey (they survive 40F in the wild this time or year, so 60F is no hardship for them). Luckily I started the soda bottle culturing approach with some uncontaminated phyto samples, since I have a feeling that the tank's culture is going to get had by starvation due to the fluffy algae in the near future. Of course, that would leave the hermits in a phyto-less tank with the algae sucking up all nutrients from the dieoff, so perhaps a win-win if my soda bottles survive...

I'm also concerned I may be running into a bit of issue with the ferts. I found some old house plant liquid fertilizer that I'd forgotten I had, and I compared the ingredients with local freshwater aquatic plant ferts and saw no significant difference (ammonia, nitrate, phosphate, K2O, and trace iron, manganese, and zinc - some trace metal differences). However, I added a few drops to one of the soda bottles and it immediately formed jelly-like white blobs. The same fert doesn't do this in freshwater, only saltwater. The blobs are dissolving very slowly and the phyto seems no worse for the wear, but is there any reason to assume that one of the more expensive freshwater ferts won't do this in saltwater and will dissolve more effectively?

 

[xxBarneyxx]

hmmmm not sure. However if you can give me a couple of days I have a bunch of ferts sitting around from when I had my planted tank so can test them for you when I get 5 minutes.

Maybe trying mixing the ferts you have with RO water to thin them out and then add it to your tank?

 

[bg7003]

I'm not sure how close to the ocean you are, but maybe if you just take sea water and use that. This way you dont have to worry about dosing and feeding. Its all there. Just a suggestion. Check out the Aquarium of Spain online or one near there(the oldest aquarium) I know they have really good info on breeding foods like that.

 

[Crazy fishes]

A really interesting find. I was wondering if you were to do that to a reef setup the impact it would have?? For sure it were mess with the light blocking out those vital frequencies......

Regards

 

[Donya]

A really interesting find. I was wondering if you were to do that to a reef setup the impact it would have?? For sure it were mess with the light blocking out those vital frequencies......

Would definitely mess up other phyotosynthesizers in the tank. I suspect in a good reef tank that phyto might have a hard time becomming established, since there nutrient level for it would always be pretty low. It would be more likely to have a brief bloom proportional to what nutrients were available. Things like skimmers would probably also act against it. If phyto did become established though for more than a few days, it can be great food for some filter feeders, and would suck out any nutrients not already being taken out by other means. Might also out-compete some macros.

I'm not sure how close to the ocean you are, but maybe if you just take sea water and use that.

I'm about 1/2hr from the coast, but that won't solve my problem. The degree that phyto exists to in the local water isn't what I want; not enough nutrients. The local water is really pretty clean; I couldn't detect any excess ammonia, nitrate, etc. with my test kits. I'm trying to get long-term bloom-level cultures established, which requires a lot of nutrients being pumped into the water. My hermits are messy animals, so the waste from their eating habbits was adding that extra supply of phyto food. If my cultures crash, I could certainly restart them with the local water, but it would need supplementing.

hmmmm not sure. However if you can give me a couple of days I have a bunch of ferts sitting around from when I had my planted tank so can test them for you when I get 5 minutes.

Maybe trying mixing the ferts you have with RO water to thin them out and then add it to your tank?

Do let me know what you find with the ferts that would be muchly appreciated. I'll try the RO suggestion as well.

 

[xxBarneyxx]

If phyto did become established though for more than a few days, it can be great food for some filter feeders, and would suck out any nutrients not already being taken out by other means. Might also out-compete some macros.

This is what Im interested in. It could well be possible to use phyto in an aglae scrubber type system.

Will be doing a water change wednesday so can chekc the ferts then on the old tank water. Will let you know how it goes.

 

[Donya]

Well, despite the weird dissolving problem with the fert, the culture has experienced really accelerated growth compared to when I was trying to culture it fert-less. The only problem I can see with the soda bottle method as opposed to other containers is that it's very prone to turning into a protein skimmer. The soda bottles make culture splitting really easy, but if those bubbles don't go at just the right rate, the exposed surface area can easily turn into a bunch of foam.

This is what Im interested in. It could well be possible to use phyto in an aglae scrubber type system.

I might be able to test that in the near future. Some of my LR in one of my picos is experiencing a rather bad hair algae takeover. I was considering putting the hairy rocks and my sea hare together for a while, but because some of the rocks has small zoas on it, I'm not sure that's the safest of ideas. The macro I've been trying to grow on those rocks would also get clobbered by the sea hare. I'm about to split one of my phyto cultures and could try putting the rocks in phyto water to see if it out-competes the hair algae. I doubt the zoas would be harmed by a couple of weeks with part of the spectrum blocked.

 

[Donya]

Annngggghhhhh

I have a new challenge. My phyto cultures in the liter jugs keep getting starved out by another algae that grows directly on the plastic & makes a very thin film. It fools me into thinking the culture is all good until I poor some out and have yellow water. The phyto tank has never experienced this issue, and the phyto keeps growing there despite other algaes being present. I can't figure out how to keep the other algae out of the culturing bottles - it seems to get in there regardless of what I do. Any thoughts/advice?

I also managed to nuke one culture with too much plant food. Good one day, dead and dying in a lump on the bottom of the jug a couple days later. You'd think it'd be a lot easier to keep this stuff going when I want to given that I can't seem to get rid of it in the hermit tank.

 

[SkiFletch]

Hummm, maybe playing with the light spectrum for the phyto might encourage it and discourage teh bad stuff... What lamps are you using now to grow it?