Growing Your Own Pods

[DianaKay]

I've only been running my refugium since November (5 months) and it's doing what it needs to do as far as I can tell.
I'm running the DSB & It's not trouble free yet. I do have cyano in my refugium, but it's NEVER matured on the sand bed...only on the acrylic walls and on my chaeto. I've had high phosphate level but I'm getting it down. I'm not worried about if it never gies away completely. It's maturing in the fuge & not in my DT.
A small amount of nitrates is not a bad thing & we can control nitrates with WCs.
The refugium can be your pod growing place & the chaeto can uptake the nutrients from the water.
I'm not seeing that it will become a nitrate trap. No more so than your DT....it's the same as a DT with chaeto instead of fish. A safe place to let your pods reproduce without having to maintain a whole seperate system.
I feel like if my refugium DSB ever gets to be trouble, I can easily take it off-line & remove it. I'm thinking it is more of an good thing & hope I don't have to do that. Time will tell.

 

[PSU4ME]

yeah, i've heard of the pod hotels too. My problem is I have a mandarin, mystery wrasse, coris wrasse, 3 blue star wrasses and a potters wrasse......not a pod to be seen in my display tank! My hope is to have a healthy copepod population in my refugium and raise amphipods externally. I've been growing copepods externally and it is working well but its a lot of work transferring them all the time. I'd like to use the amphipods as a bi-weekly treat.

 

[mikecc]

Sounds like all you need then is a bucket and some water and some sort of starter culture then? Oh, and a light bulb. and prob a rock.

I feed my pods in my tank when I feed the rest of the filter feeders, I do believe.

 

[DianaKay]

Yep Bryan, you may have TOO MANY fish that compete with each other for the same live food source.
It's easy & cheap to buy frozen & dry packed foods...not so easy to keep enough pods for THAT MANY pod eaters
Have you thought about feeding & growing live WHITE WORMS?
I have a culture of them going, they are not hard to grow.
Live worms might be what you need
I got my starter here: (offsite link) http://www.fishgobble.com

 

[PSU4ME]

I have toyed with the worm idea.......I read the article you posted (thanks!).

Can you describe your process/materials? Maybe a pic?

 

[DianaKay]

This is the best thread (by Paul B.) for worm info.
http://www.reefsanctuary.com/forums/indepth-topics-disscussion/85234-white-worms-black-worms.html

Just buy a bag of potting soil, a container with a lid to be your "worm bed" and water mister bottle.
They have ready to use worms for sale on eBay also if you want to start off with more.
They really aren't hard to grow.

 

[PSU4ME]

Looks like I gotta go find a shoebox now!

 

[StirCrayzy]

I used to culture trigger pods in an old 2.5 g barebottom using 2 bath scrubbers (yes the poofy floofy ones your best girl uses) as housing. Just make sure they're plastic. Bought 2 starter bottle at LFS a month apart to increase diversity.
I had only a air driven sponge filter for flow, and I used old DT water from WCs.
I swapped in a rock or two from the DT every other week, and shook out one of the two scrubbers into the DT every other week. I never fed them anything, but I could tell it was working because of the sheer # I could shake outta that scrubber, every time. I did this for about 6 -9months whille I had my mandarin to keep her fat an happy.
In addition to BBS a couple times a week.