Phytoplankton Culturing

[bigbird69]

I've had quite a few people ask about culturing Phytoplankton here lately. So I wrote a quick how to on my site.


http://thomason-family.com/12.html


Sharon

[Debs]

Wow, very interesting. I have been thinking of doing this. Will this lead to high phosphates in the tank? And is it possible to accomplish this with sunlight. I have a sun porch that gets lots of light.

[bigbird69]

I have heard of people using natural sunlight, a light was just easier for us.

I check the nitrates and phosphates in my phyto water periodically. If i stay on schedule and don't split it to soon the fertilizer will have dissipated to almost unreadable.

Sharon

[redvipe2010]

Great job Sharon! Very informative!

[Loverotties]

Nice job!

[alpine]

Nice write up.Any particular reason you mix the sg of the culture medium so high? I have always heard and read to mix the culture medium to a sg of 1.019.

[bigbird69]

i stared culturing mine at 1.019 as recommended. But since we always keep 1.026 water change water on hand, I figured it would make life easier if i could use it. So i experimented by raising it to 1.021, then 1.023, and finally 1.026. I saw no difference what so ever. So we use 1.026.

[Ron69]

Hi, Sharon is my wife
I guess i should mention that we did a lot of experimenting with using different fertilizers, different amounts of fertilizer, different lenghts of time before splitting the culture, etc....

The sg didn't seem to make a difference, so we used 1.026 because it was the easiest.
The type of fertilizer, amount, and amount of time before splitting that we use worked out to be the best for having the most dense culture, with the lowest nitrates, and phosphates,
The light and amount of light gave the best growth, we tried many diffrent types of lighting and varying lengths of lighting time.
Temperature didn't seem to make a difference at all.

In all honesty we found it very hard to not be successful. If you get anywhere close to the guidelines we posted you should have great results. It is not rocket science lol.
Our eight year old can do it