breeding daphne

heya guys so im looking to breed daphnia as i would like to feed my fish more live food but cant afford to pay R12 a bag every week twice a week so i was thinking it would be easier to breed them myself. how hard is it to breed these lil critters and what would i need? from the research iv done i would only need a 2L coke bottle and add some soil and compost but i dnt know how true this is. my beta enjoys hunting for them so i would like to be able to treat him more often to live foods. would blood worms be easier to breed do you think?

 

I have never used Soil and compost. I will start in summer with green water in the outside tank. I will post the setup then

 

Do you have to buy a starter culture?

I think I remember somebody telling me that you can use chicken/poultry manure.
Think this is used to keep the algae growing as the daphnia need green water.
They eat of the algae.

 

Windfire, I used to keep 2 x 1000L drums outside, when I stayed in Pretoria - one for brineshrimp and one for daphnia.
Daphnia breed themselves if you have lots of green water. The drums each had 3 x 300w heaters in them, with air from a blower. To start, I threw in about a bucket of chicken manure and lots of dry yeast. After a week, I put in a large bag of daphnia and wait... After 2 weeks I had so much daphnia, the net used to bend, when I fished them out for breeding/conditioning and supplied lfs in Pta!
The same setup was also used for Brineshrimp, but about 40Kg of coarse salt was used to get a salinity of 1010. But that's another story.
With 36 tanks, most of them for breeding, I had to go big, or go home..lol!
Nowadays I use a 3ft tank for daphnia and 2L cooldrink bottles for brineshrimp.
Hope this help!
Gert.

 

wow those are weird looking things http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphnia