Heres part of a thread by
@Colin_T
INFUSORIA
Infusoria for fish culture purposes are generally single celled animals called Paramecium. Numerous recipes for their growth are available. The most common being crushed lettuce leaves in a bucket of water and then left to grow for a few weeks. Any non-toxic plant matter (spinach, silverbeet, cabbage, broccoli, lawn clippings, hay, oak leaves, maple leaves, eucalypt leaves, sliced banana or banana peel, sliced apple or apple peel, etc) can be used instead of lettuce leaves. I recommend lettuce because they are cheap and readily available in most parts of the world, and they break down quickly and easily and at a similar rate.
The only plants you can't use are poisonous plants and plants that produce a white sap when the leaves get picked or broken. And avoid citrus (lemon, lime, orange, mandarin) or citrus peel, onions, spring onions, leeks, shallots, garlic and potatoe.
Use a large plastic container (at least 40 litres) full of dechlorinated water and add one whole lettuce for every 20 litres (5 gallons) of water. Tap water is preferred so you get a pure culture of infusoria. You need to add a lot of plant matter to the water, 1 whole lettuce per 20 litres or an equivalent amount of plant matter. You would need about 5-6 large spinach plants or a couple of bunches of silverbeet to equal 1 whole lettuce. If you get a 10 litre (2.5 gallon) bucket and fill that with leaves or lawn clippings, that would be about the same as a lettuce.
Rinse the leaves well (make sure they are free of chemicals & pesticides) and crush them up before adding. Have an airstone bubbling away in the culture. Put a lid on the container and leave it to bubble away for a few weeks.
The water initially goes dark and smells awful as the leaves break down and bacteria starts to feed on the rotting leaves. If the culture is not aerated during this time it goes black and becomes anaerobic, and it stinks. Aeration prevents this from happening. After a couple of weeks, infusoria start to grow in the culture and they eat the bacteria. When this happens the water will start to clear and develop a slight yellow tinge from the tannins in the leaves. The water will not smell bad and if you remove the airstone for 10 minutes and allow all the rotten plant matter to settle to the bottom of the container, you will see tiny white specks moving about in groups. These are the infusoria.
You can scoop these out using a fine mesh net (5 micron net), or syphon them out, or just use a small plastic container to scoop these clusters out. You add the infusoria to the fry tank and the fish eat them as their first food.
If you use a container to scoop the infusoria out, you should check the temperature, pH and ammonia levels in the water. The pH will usually be below 7.0 and there will usually be ammonia in the water. If there is a pH difference or high levels of ammonia in the infusoria water, you should try to reduce the amount of water added to the fry rearing tank.
Once you have an infusoria culture producing fry food, you can keep it going by adding a few crushed up lettuce leaves (or other plant matter) every few days, and the new leaves break down and provide food for the bacteria, which provide food for the infusoria. If you don't add new leaves each day or every couple of days, the bacteria eventually stop growing and the paramecium run out of food and you run out of paramecium to feed to the fry.
The new leaves only have to be added after the culture is established and you do not have to add leaves while it is developing. The new leaves are simply to extend the cultures life and keep it going for a few weeks, which is usually long enough for the fry to be moved onto newly hatched brineshrimp.
If you have several cultures going you can harvest from one in the morning, one at lunch and one at night. This gives the cultures more time to recover between harvests and gives you a back up culture if one crashes, which can happen in really hot weather or it you forget to put the airstone back in.
Cultures also die after a period of time so if you plan on breeding fish you should start new cultures every few weeks to ensure you have a plentiful supply of fry food when you get fry, and to use as a back up if a culture crashes or becomes infested with insect larvae. Mozzie larvae love infusoria cultures and one female mosquito can lay hundreds of eggs in a culture and the larvae will eat all the infusoria.
Infusoria cultures do not need a light source and can be cultured indoors where there is normal room light or in dark sheds. The only time you need light is to see the infusoria so you can collect them.
A tank of snails (mystery snails are frequently used) that are kept and fed on lettuce or other plant matter, will produce infusoria as well. The infusoria feeds on bacteria that eats the rotting snail poo. The infusoria can be harvested and fed to fry. For a snail tank to produce quantities of infusoria you need to reduce or remove the filtration in their tank. This can be a problem if lots of snails are kept as the water quality can deteriorate quite quickly. Air stones bubbling away and frequent water changes will help keep the water suitable for the snails, but not filter out all the infusoria.
ROTIFERS
Rotifers are multi-celled animals that are quite small, ranging in size from 20 microns to an inch in length. Some require a microscope to be seen. Others can be seen with the naked eye but exact details are difficult to see clearly without some ocular help. Rotifers will feed and grow in green water and infusoria cultures. This isn't a problem for most, however it can annoy those trying to keep pure cultures of a certain plant/ animal.
To culture rotifers, obtain some cysts (dormant eggs) and add them to a container of green water. Have an airstone bubbling away gently in one corner of the container. Shortly after being added to water the cysts will hatch and within a few weeks you will have a thriving colony of rotifers. Once a culture is going you should start new cultures every few weeks. One way to do this is to take a couple of litres of green water and live rotifers from an established culture and add that to a new container of green water. This will provide you with alternative sources when the older culture crashes and dies off.
When a culture does die off you can drain the water out but keep the sediment on the bottom. Allow the sediment to dry out for several weeks. The sediment will contain rotifer cysts and can be used to start a new culture if it is added to some clean green water. If you don't want to start a new culture straight away, you can freeze the sediment in a plastic bag or put it in the bottom of the fridge and the cysts can remain dormant like this for years.
Rotifer cysts can be obtained from various aquaculture suppliers including Florida Aqua Farms, (see the following link).
http
/florida-aqua-farms.com/shop/resting-rotifer-cultures/
The link is meant to be http: //florida-aqua-farms.com etc, (no space between the : and the /) but the auto correcting makes the : / into an unhappy face.
To harvest the small species of rotifers, you can use a fine mesh net (5-10 micron) or scoop them out with some green water and add it to the rearing tank. The bigger species can be caught out with a normal aquarium fish net.
DAPHNIA & CYCLOPS
Daphnia and cyclops can be collected from ponds during various times of the year and kept for short periods in containers of aquarium water that is gently aerated. They can be cultured in the same way as rotifers (in containers of green water or infusoria) and will supply you with a year round source of small live fish food. Surplus Daphnia can be frozen in ice cube trays and used when live Daphnia is not available.
When conditions are good, the female Daphnia produces live babies (clones) that make a great food source for small fish. When conditions deteriorate the females produce eggs that go dormant and can survive drying out. These eggs can be left to dry out for several months before being added to containers of green water to start new cultures. Alternatively scoop some live Daphnia out of a culture and add them to a new container of green water and they will continue to grow there.
To harvest Daphnia you use a fine mesh aquarium fish net to scoop out the babies, or a course mesh aquarium fish net to catch the adults. You can also scoop them out in some water but nets are more efficient.
BRINESHRIMP
Brine shrimp eggs are readily available from pet shops and can be hatched out in salt water to provide a valuable source of food for young fish. Most nutritional value from brine shrimp is obtained during the first two days after hatching while they still have their yolk sac.
Dry brineshrimp eggs should be kept dry and in an air tight container in the fridge or freezer to maximise their shelf life.
A simply brineshrimp hatchery can be made out of a 2 litre plastic drink bottle. Cut the top off the bottle and throw the top bit away. Half fill the bottle with sea water or salt water made to the same salinity as sea water. You can buy a hydrometer from any pet shop to measure salinity in water. You can use rock salt, sea salt, or swimming pool salt for this. Put an airstone in the container and add 1/4 of a level teaspoon of dry brineshrimp eggs to the salt water. Put the container somewhere warm, I had mine on top of an aquarium. The eggs are brown and take 24-48 hours to hatch, depending on temperature. In warmer water (28-30C) they hatch faster than in cooler water (20C). When you see orange dots in the water, the eggs have hatched. The orange dots are the baby brineshrimp called nauplii.
Plastic multi coloured airstones are the best airstones to use because they can be taken apart and the salt and old egg shells can be removed. Many brands of these airstones also have a small lead weight in the bottom that helps hold the airstone at the bottom of the container.
To harvest the baby brineshrimp, you remove the airstone, wait 5 minutes for the eggs and nauplii to separate, and then use an eye dropper to suck the nauplii out and feed them to the fish. The nauplii are attracted to light, so having a light on one side of the culture will encourage the baby shrimp to gather in one spot and makes them easier to syphon out.
Try not to put the brown eggs into the rearing tanks because fry can choke on them.
A plastic plant mister can be filled with freshwater and used to wash the salt and eggs off the sides of the hatchery throughout the day.
After you have fed the nauplii to the fish fry, put the airstone back in the culture and wait until the fry need feeding again before removing the airstone and sucking out more nauplii.
A couple of days after the eggs have hatched the culture will start to go off due to the egg shells rotting in the water. When this happens you tip out the remaining culture onto the garden and wash the container and airstone/ airline and make them nice and clean. Then you can re-use the container to start a new culture.
You should start a new culture every day or every second day and use up all the nauplii within 48 hours of the eggs hatching because that is when they have the most nutritional value. You can feed surplus nauplii to adult guppies, dwarf gouramis, tetras, barbs, rainbowfish, virtually any fish less than 5 inches long will eat newly hatched brineshrimp.
DECAPSULATED BRINESHRIMP EGGS
You can get decapsulated brineshrimp eggs and these don’t rot in the water. Decapsulated eggs have had the shell removed and you can either hatch them out normally in salt water, or feed the eggs directly to the fish.
If you want to decapuslate your own brineshrimp eggs you can do it quite easily. You add some dry eggs to a bottle or container of fresh water, and add some bleach or granular chlorine. You swirl this solution around until the brown eggs go orange. The bleach dissolves the brown egg shell leaving behind the orange egg. At which point you gently pour the orange eggs into a fine mesh net and rinse under some tap water. After a few minutes rinsing you put them in a container of freshwater and add a double dose of dechlorinator and swirl around for a couple more minutes. Then one more rinse under the tap before adding the eggs to some salt water to hatch.
This takes a bit of practice and if you leave the eggs in bleach for too long you kill them. If you don't leave the eggs in the bleach for long enough you have white egg shells in the hatching container.
You can use different concentrations of bleach and find one that works for you. Stronger bleach solutions will dissolve the egg shell faster so you have to watch the eggs for the changing colour.
MICROWORMS
Microworms can be cultured in instant porridge. Get a small plastic container and spread a thin layer of oatmeal across the bottom. Add enough tap water to just cover the oatmeal and then put it in the microwave for a couple of minutes. After a minute in the microwave you remove the container and stir it up before putting it back in the microwave for another minute or so. Remove the oatmeal and mix it again before spreading it out in several small plastic containers (1-2 litre icecream containers work well for this). You have a 5-6mm (1/4 inch) layer of oatmeal on the bottom of each container and let it cool, this only takes a few minutes. Then you add a teaspoon of microworms (from a starter culture bought online or at pet shops) to each container of oatmeal and put the lid on it. Allow the culture to grow for a week and the worms will spread over the oatmeal and grow up the sides of the container. Use your finger to carefully wipe some of the worms off the side of the container and wiggle your finger about in the fry rearing tank. The worms are tiny and wash off in the water and the fry eat them.
You can add more than a teaspoon of worms to each culture if you have access to a lot of worms but a teaspoon is the minimum you want to add. Drip the worms around the porridge/ oatmeal so they cover more of it faster.
You can feed dry Baker's Yeast (available from any supermarket) to the worms to help give them a boost. Normally yeast is only added one time, a few days after a culture has been started. You can add yeast every few days but too much yeast can cause cultures to crash so I normally only add it one time or if a culture is doing well, I might add it once a week while the culture is doing well.
Have several cultures going and start new cultures each week. Keep cultures cool but not too cold, and avoid really hot weather. Normal room temperatures that suit people, are ideal for microworms.
If a culture does not have many worms, you sometimes get fungus growing over the oatmeal. You can take worms from this culture and use them to start a new culture before throwing the furry culture away. Wash the culture containers out in hot soapy water (dishwasher) between uses. Open the cultures up each day for a minute to let fresh air get into them. You do not need to have holes in the lid of the culture and insects will sometimes get into the cultures if you do have holes in the lid.
When cultures start to go off, the oatmeal worm mixtures starts to turn brown and then black and it smells unpleasant. Start new cultures before this happens and dispose of cultures that have gone black or dark brown.
. If there's any other details you need to know about anything.
