Live food for YOUR reef?

[Anonymous]

You really know your stench! It just smelled off....

 

[rayjay]

I've never known any cyro NOT to stink. They all stink different but all bad as far as I'm concerned. The smell is not strong, especially after dilution, but if I get the concentrate on my hands I certainly want to wash it off. Tahitian Blend has the worst smell as far as I'm concerned, and that's probably due to the multiple pastes that are blended to make it. It IS imo, the best food for the juvenile stage of the artemia, while for the adults I mix 1/2 TB and 1/2 Pavlova, the Pavlova being a larger algae is more suitable for adults.
That all being said however, I don't even like the smell of the live phyto that I grow.

 

[Anonymous]

What species do you grow? I can't smell the few I've tried.

 

[Anonymous]

Since the company I work for sells it to BSD, I'm kind of interested in the smell from a QA stand point DMS is given off by phyto and smells kinda like hydrogen sulfide but has it's own smell to those that know the difference. Hydrogen Sulfide, if that is what your smelling is, is horriable (toxic) to larvea, etc.

FWIW, all phyto have thier own smell, you say stench, I say smell Some I hate, others smell great in prep. If you ever have a chance to smell nanno right from the centrofuge you'll know what I'm talking about

 

[rayjay]

What species do you grow? I can't smell the few I've tried.

I actually don't know what kind it is. It was originally started with a live Nano concentrate from ReefCrew here in Ontario Canada.
I spit it into five lots and cultured it. They all appeared to die off but then went green again so I kept them going. Four of the five developed very well but had a definite blue green color so I know it wasn't nano. After some experimenting, the artemia nauplii didn't seem to feed on it very well so I discarded it.
The fifth one, when it started greening up again, looked very much like the original nano but I suspect it is actually something different also. However, unlike the blue green, this works well in my feeding program for the artemia.
It is almost a definite that this is not nano as it is very hard to kill off, and I grow it in open rubbermaid containers as well as in gallon cider jars and inverted pop bottles. Every once in a while, one of the containers changes to the blue green so I dump it and bleach the container before starting another. It seems that as long as I don't use more than 60% of a culture, then it stays the green type, unless I don't feed it the F/2 fertilizer soon enough. I wish there were a simple test to know exactly when it needs more F/2 so I can minimize the amounts I use without occasionally loosing a culture for not having enough.
Because it works well, and is very easy to sustain, I don't worry about exactly what kind of algae it is, although it would be interesting to know.

Since the company I work for sells it to BSD

I personally haven't had any problem with any of the cryo I purchased from BSD and I've purchased quite a bit over the last few years.
I like the product from BSD as they ad the glycerin that makes it so I can keep it in the freezer. I need this feature because it is tremendously expensive for me to import it and have to buy a lot each time to lower the unit costs. The last order was almost $160 CDN for the product and the shipping and 10.5% duties came up to $204 for a total cost of $364.
It's nice to be Canadian until you have to import something!!!!!

 

[Anonymous]

every tank i've owned develops/ed daily plankton (phyto, and zoo), and 'bug' (amphipod, etc)bloom cycles to the point where adding live foods is rarely necessary,(whether i want them to or not, heh- and lets me go for days without feeding a thing to the fish

it adds to the turbidity of the water abit-but i can live with that (some nights all i can see is a nice cloud of plankton in the water column-from zip worms and copepods to stuff that is probably floc-my corals also seem to enjoy the meals it provides )

 

[Chubosco]

Brine shrimp? Hmmmmm...ah, you mean sea monkeys.