These look realy cool B) ..great pics
I'm thinking of getting some for a project for my 13 year old son.
Can you give me a quick breakdown of what I need for them three fingers.
I have an 8ukg cube, with built in light also has a good mini filter with carbon canister. Will this be too big? and do they need a heater.
Any info would be appreciated
Sure
.
The 8g cube sounds great, although you should use a sponge filter or preferably just an airstone until they reach about 1cm, otherwise the baby triops will get sucked in and die.
To start off you need de-ionized(from B&Q for £1 a litre or most tescos for 50p per litre), distilled or if you cant get any of those two-bottled spring water. You should fill the tank about 8cm with water for them to hatch and after they have reached about 1cm start slowly topping it up over a few days with regular dechlorinated tap water, the same stuff you use to do water changes in fish tanks(as long as it has no heavy metals or chlorine).
The very young triops eat infusoria in the water, so if you buy a kit with 'pure' triops eggs you should follow the instructions
here to make some detritus.
After they look like adults you can feed them on pretty much anything, but use crushed flake food until they reach a couple of cm.
The rest depends on the species and being in the UK, you have 3 choices of Triops species:
The most common and easiest species to rear is the American species is
Triops longicaudatus, which is also the fastest growing commercially available species. Provided the water temperature doesn't drop below 18degrees celsius, you don't need a heater for this species but its always safer anyway. If you use a heater make sure the temperature doesn't go above 30 celcius. This is the species x-Lucy-Fish-x has and it will reach about 2inches including tail(sometimes slightly larger). Its relatively rare for this species to live over 70 days(my brother has one around 80 days right now though), but quite often the eggs hatch without having to dry out the aquarium, so you could have a tank that is constantly growing more and more triops(you can add stuff to the water to stop them hatching, cant remember what though, ill find out if you ever need to know
).
You can buy it in kits in most toy shops or just the eggs from
red turkey or
the netfysh.
Triops cancriformis can reach up to 4.5 inches(this is rare though) and generally lives longer than the American species. It is native to Britain, is critically endangered and is the oldest known living species on the planet. Its thought all other triops species evolved from it. For triops cancriformis you don't need a heater as long as the water doesn't go below 10 celcius. It grows slower than the American species though and takes a little longer to hatch too.
You can buy it from
triops.cc or i can sell you some 'pure' eggs that mine left behind.
The third species is
Triops australiensis. There is some debate to if the commercially available T.australiensis are actually Triops australiensis or an unknown australian subspecies of T.longicaudatus, since the T.australiensis you can buy look more like T.longicaudatus than wild T.australiensis. None the less, the T.australiensis you can buy do look different and need a temperature of around 28 celcius to hatch. Other than that T.australiensis can be treated the same as T.longicaudatus.
You can buy T.australiensis from
Cornish Crispa.
Any more questions, feel free to ask
. Hmm, not quite as 'quick' as i was hoping to be, sorry
.
They've eaten a hole in it and all the stuff came out.. I'll take it out soon.
i paid...god about 5 pounds for my kit!
They shed at least once a day.
