The build thread: 430gal. display

R

Rcpilot

Anthias
#781
#781
First time visiting this thread. I'm amazed.

I don't know if you ever found food for the larvae or not. If you need copepods, I have them. Not enough to feed your larvae, but enough to start a culture.

What EXACT kind of pods? I do not know. I am fairly certain they are copepods though. They live in the sand and swarm at night. They are VERY tiny - 1/2 the size of a grain of sugar - maybe smaller. They look like dust specks in the water, but you can see they are actively swimming around. They are white in color.

If you want them, I can suck some out of the sand bed - but you'll have to tell me how to collect them.

If you want them, but cannot collect or farm them right now, I have a 10g frag tank full of them and it is about to go fallow in the next 7-10 days. I can turn that into a farm if you tell me how to increase their numbers.

I could possibly collect a few and take macro shots of them, but my camera sucks and my photography skills suck even more. :p
 
Ummfish

Ummfish

Dolphin
M.A.S.C Club Member
#782
#782
Wow! Thanks for the offer! It sounds like whatever you are doing is keeping them going. The two possibilities that I can think of are harpactacoid copepods (most of them eat pretty much any very small dead foods) or juvenile mysis shrimp (which aren't shrimp, but eat pretty much the same as the copepods).

I'm not sure when I can get down there. I'm picking up a house guest tomorrow morning and plan to be incapacitated after, as my knee is really hating drives to Denver lately. Going to the meeting at Cris' last weekend pretty much took me out for the whole week. But you aren't far, so I can figure something out. Once I pick them up from you, I can take some pictures and we can figure out what they are. Thanks again!

-----------------------------------------------

78 sixline eggs tonight. Since I haven't gotten any hatches lately, I pulled an egg for examination. The egg was already looking a little cloudy as if there is a bacterial/fungal thing going on. By the end of the pipetting there were already many eggs on the bottom of the hatching chamber, cloudy. So, I think I need to start working on disinfection.
 
Ummfish

Ummfish

Dolphin
M.A.S.C Club Member
#783
#783
Quote from Martin Moe:

Matt, just a suggestion..... Your C. argi should continue to spawn nightly for quite some time, a valuable characteristic for rearing experimentation. You might find, as did I, that if you take a container of brood stock water, somewhere between a half and full liter, and treat it with chlorine in the afternoon or the morning, doesn't really matter, on the day you plan to collect the eggs, then dechlorinate the water about a half hour before you collect the eggs, then collect the eggs with a soft mesh net by swirling the net about the surface of the tank (turn off the filtration before spawning and remember to turn it back on again after egg collection), and then place the eggs in the container of dechlorinated water with slight to moderate aeration over night, then in the morning you will find that 95 to 99% of the eggs are alive and crystal clear with a well developed and near to hatch (depending on temp) embryo within the chorion (egg shell). (How's that for a long sentence...) Evidently there is something in the sterilized and newly dechorinated water that inhibits or delays development of bacterial and fungal films that can degrade the developing embryo. However, the longer they are cramped up in a little container the greater the mortality. It is best to transfer them while still in the egg stage to the larva tank.
Click to expand...
http://www.marinebreeder.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=203&t=411&hilit=egg+disinfection&start=175

Quote from DrHsu (who quoted it from another article):

During project Year 2, larvae research at OI focused on examining the effects of different microbial conditions on flame angelfish rearing performance. A small scale rearing system was established, allowing rigorous testing of multiple experimental treatments. This system was used to develop a disinfection technique that reduced surface bacterial loading of angelfish embryos by more than 99%, involving immersion in a 3% solution of hydrogen peroxide for five minutes.
Click to expand...
http://www.marinebreeder.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=203&t=411&p=4618&hilit=egg+disinfection#p4618
 
R

Rcpilot

Anthias
#784
#784
Ummfish;15599 said:
Wow! Thanks for the offer! It sounds like whatever you are doing is keeping them going. The two possibilities that I can think of are harpactacoid copepods (most of them eat pretty much any very small dead foods) or juvenile mysis shrimp (which aren't shrimp, but eat pretty much the same as the copepods).

I'm not sure when I can get down there. I'm picking up a house guest tomorrow morning and plan to be incapacitated after, as my knee is really hating drives to Denver lately. Going to the meeting at Cris' last weekend pretty much took me out for the whole week. But you aren't far, so I can figure something out. Once I pick them up from you, I can take some pictures and we can figure out what they are. Thanks again!
Click to expand...
No hurry. I will ghost feed the tank and grow them until we can collect a sample. I'd love to bring them to you. Would sure like to get a look at your tanks. They are quite impressive.

I don't think they get any bigger than this, so I don't think they are juvenile mysis. But you're probably much more educated about different types of pods than me - so who knows?

Check this video:

Sorry for the silly narrative. I'm a geek. Was trying to explain the difference between copepods and amphipods to a newbie.
 
Ummfish

Ummfish

Dolphin
M.A.S.C Club Member
#786
#786
I don't know why I don't always get updates for this thread. Sorry. Nice video and link! I still can't decide between mysids and copepods, but both are worthwhile. Mysis start hiding more when they get a little older, so you don't see the bigger ones as much.

My houseguest left today and, as expected, I'm hobbling around. But I can make a trip down at some point or you are certainly quite welcome to come up. My house is a wreck at the moment. Entirely my fault as I haven't been able to help as much. But if you don't mind the clutter....

So, I was coming on here to post an update:


It looks like the increased nutrition might be helping. I had a houseguest that came in early yesterday and left late today, so I didn't collect yesterday and didn't have time to prep for disinfection tonight. But, still 72 eggs in the collection tonight. AND, I get to fill in one of the photo gaps, sixline eggs at the 2 cell stage:





I think that the fact that they look like they are developing outside of the cell is an artifact of the narrow depth of field. I think that they are on the back wall of the egg.
 
Ummfish

Ummfish

Dolphin
M.A.S.C Club Member
#787
#787
138 (go nutrition!) sixline eggs, placed in a yogurt container of newly-dechlorinated broodstock tank water. Just for fun, I took a photo of a group with the camera instead of the microscope.

 
Ummfish

Ummfish

Dolphin
M.A.S.C Club Member
#788
#788
Okay, so this morning the embryos are in a couple of different stages. Most are still in the "big ball of cells" (blastosphere) stage:



You can no longer really make out the individual cells. The embryo likely has a working, primitive digestive system now, though. The yolk has started shrinking away from the egg membrane (chorion) just a little.

This other guy has made the next big leap. It's organized itself into a long, thin tube that runs around the inside of the cell membrane. It's still a pretty flat tube because there still aren't a whole lot of cells to go around.



The tube gets longer and fatter while the embryo starts working on internal structures.
 
Ummfish

Ummfish

Dolphin
M.A.S.C Club Member
#791
#791
Check it out! Lots of prolarvae today!

So, this is with normal processing to make it easier to see:



This is with the curves pushed way out of normal to increase the contrast:



And labelled:



And another prolarva:



They still don't have working mouths and their eyes may not work yet, but probably time to start acclimating them to the larval rearing tank. "Rearing" is an awfully hopeful word, yeah?
 
Ummfish

Ummfish

Dolphin
M.A.S.C Club Member
#792
#792
Sixline update:
Yesterday: 3 meals, 58 eggs of not terribly good quality (not very buoyant).

Today: 5 meals, 288 eggs, very few not floating right at the surface of the water.

You think nutrition plays a role in egg production? And people wonder why their fish don't spawn in typical reef tanks.
 
Mantid

Mantid

Dolphin
M.A.S.C Club Member
#793
#793
Ummfish;16188 said:
Sixline update:
Yesterday: 3 meals, 58 eggs of not terribly good quality (not very buoyant).

Today: 5 meals, 288 eggs, very few not floating right at the surface of the water.

You think nutrition plays a role in egg production? And people wonder why their fish don't spawn in typical reef tanks.
Click to expand...

Just feed em flakes, they'll do fine. lol.

That's crazy, never would have thought buoyancy of food would really make that much of a difference. goes to show that it might upset the stomach of a fish just feeding freeze-dried food. I have a hard enough time just getting that freeze-dried krill down to my toadfish. think of how he feels.
 
26bowfront

26bowfront

Goby
#794
#794
Hey Andy,

Have you looked into phase contrast microscopy at all? It would make it easier for you to get some high contrast images of what you're photographing.
 
Ummfish

Ummfish

Dolphin
M.A.S.C Club Member
#795
#795
Chad--I think the buoyancy issue has to do with the amount of fatty acids in the diet and how much the fish can spare for each egg yolk. It looks like sixlines need a good bit in order to optimize what she gives to her eggs.

26--My microscopy skills are limited and self-taught, so I don't know much. It does look like that could solve some of my problems, though. From a quick search around, it looks like I could change my microscope to phase by simply switching out the objectives? Then, of course, the issue becomes tracking down what objectives work with my scope.

Of course, that wouldn't actually help with the recent photos because I shot those without a microscope.
 
26bowfront

26bowfront

Goby
#796
#796
Ya I'm currently in the process of seeing if I can make the modifications to mine. I believe you have to change the objectives and the light condenser. I'm not sure if they make the condenser part for my specific model, if not I'm going to have to modify it myself somehow i think.
 
Ummfish

Ummfish

Dolphin
M.A.S.C Club Member
#797
#797
The sixline female is giving me consistent batches of about 200 eggs these days. I'm now getting more of them to the prolarvae stage. I pulled 198 yesterday, dipped the eggs in a hydrogen peroxide solution, and placed them into recently dechlorinated broodstock water. I can only see 20-30, well maybe 40 undeveloped eggs on the bottom, and lots in late embryonic to early prolarval stages. Some more photos:







I'm still seeing a little nitrite in the larval system water, so I may hold some low-level feeding trials in the little deli container and see what I see.
 
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