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Unread 03/31/2016, 10:23 PM   #3469
taricha
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Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: NE Miss
Posts: 608
Update on a few different things I've been looking at.
1. I tried growing dense benthic ciliate cultures in beakers 3 times. Once by published rotifer recipe grew huge uronychia ciliates that can ingest big (dino sized) particles stopped growing after 6 or 7 days then declined, once on pure yeast (a paper said with euplotes they achieved 10/ml to 5000/ml in 6 days on just yeast) mine never got really rolling - hard to estimate right amount of food, one attempt on yeast enriched with skimmate, vitamins etc, never got very far. I guess first one was best. uronychia culture got a liter at about 100-200 per ml. I'll try again later, maybe sooner if I run across any good info for culturing large ciliates on particles instead of bacteria. Some kinds grow well on bacteria and different kinds on larger particles.

2. Have been growing dinos in beakers of sand and tank water with added trace elements. worked well. Got one healthy gallon culture of amphidinium from my tank, got one developing of ostreopsis from robertifly (yay). Should be able to do some experiments on them.

3. Robertifly also sent me some of the Sea Veggies dried seaweed to check for dino connection. Couple people have reported dino blooms coinciding with feeding the stuff. The veggies themselves are clean as expected. No dino cysts. Now to see if I can figure which nutrients in it are fueling growth.
The two species of seaweed are porphyra yezoensis and palmaria palmata.

4. The thin brown dino strings I saw growing from roots of caulerpa, saw the same growing from tips of urchin spines.

Under the scope, dinos (ostreopsis)!


Which makes me think that they really just grab on to whatever isn't mucous protected (no sign on my softies) that sits in high flow, just like the netting used earlier by nvladik. So I put a strip of filter floss in front of pump yesterday

Today, quite brown!

Wrung brown out into a dish
Big ol' Osti party.


5. I also pulled the few dinos out of my tank and split into beakers. Mix of small amounts of both amphidinium and ostreopsis The population in my tank is small but stable at the time I pulled it out. One beaker got nothing added, one got iron, one b12. Hoping for dramatic growth in one of the treatments indicating a limitation.



Last edited by taricha; 03/31/2016 at 10:39 PM.
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