Help needed for Culturing Rotifers for clownfish fry

[mwilliams]

Since there was not a section for Saltwater Breeding are atleast I cannot find one I am posting this thread here in need of help......

Okay I am in need of some help here….. I am in the process of culturing some Rotifers for my future clownfish fry and need to know what I am doing wrong…..So I can get it corrected before my female lays her second batch.. I lost the first batch my fault…
They are sinking to the bottom of the bucket I have my air flow kind of a slow but when I would scope the top of the water there is no rotifers in there..
When I stir it up and scope again then I have some in there..

My question is if I have it on slow flow which is way more than what you are supposed to have in the fry tank so how do I keep them afloat so the fry will find them and eat them? The fry tank has to have one bubble per second and that is way slower than what I have going on now in the buckets…
And if I have to scope from the bottom of the bucket then I will be getting all the detritus in the mix of rotifers and I don’t think that is supposed to go into the fry tank.

Please any advice will be greatly appreciated….

 

[MrPeon99]

I used a 10 gallon tank to raise fry and breed rotifers. Over about a month I bred rotifers in the 10 gallon tank. Each week adding more water and phyto, keeping the temp at 80f. Once I reached hatching day I cleaned out the tank leaving about a gallon of rotifer water and adding about 3 gallon of display water. I collected half the eggs that hatched ( they hatched over two nights ) and added them to the tank. Over the next several days I would add phyto to the tank to co-culture the rotifers and baby clown fish. This kept my rotifer population high for the baby clowns. I used a sponge filter (from my sump so it would have bacteria on it) and keep the bubbles high enough to move the water but allow the fish to swim where they wanted. After about day 9 I started adding baby brine shrimp. I started with about 30 clown fish and now I have 10 that lived through everything. Some were lost in the beginning and others where lost to my stupidity. But over all everything turned out pretty good

 

[mwilliams]

At what salinity did you have the rotifier culture water at? And how did you empty the water out of the tank on hatch day? Through a coffee filter or the special seive they have for rotifiers?

 

[MrPeon99]

I used a .53 micron sleeve to catch them all. Really it just catches all the adults. The babies pass through, but since they breed so fast at 80F I don't worry about it. I kept the salinity at about 1.020 that way when I add tank water I don't have to worry about the rotifers going into salinity shock. About a day after I add the clown fish fry I do drop the salinity back down to 1.020 and keep it there until they pass metamorphosis at which time I bring it back up to 1.026

 

[mwilliams]

Cool thanks... I might need to raise the salinity up it is 1.018 and the tank water is 1.023 to .024.