Pod farm how to?

[Leadfootedracer]

Thinking I want to put a simple 5 gal pod farm next to my sump. I already have the 5 gal tank.

Looks like I need a small air pump and stone, some form of living quarters, and a large dose of pods.

Does the pod water need to be heated, or is room temp, right next to my sump in an enclosed cabinet, good enough?

How do you get the pods out of the water without taking too much of the water with it?

Is there anything else I need?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[s_kelley]

Cool idea, start a thread documenting what you do and how it works out

 

[PSU4ME]

I tried one once, lasted a little but if you don't keep up with the harvesting and feeding it crashes quick. You'll need some sieves, different micron sizes to filter out the pods. Lots of phyto too.

I changed the pod tank water with water change water from the display. Tried to keep them aligned to avoid shock.

 

[Leadfootedracer]

I thought the purpose of the pod farm was to eventually eliminate the phyto? The phyto is the expensive part, that I'm trying to eliminate. I have a small fuge in my sump, and it has rock, sand, and macro in it. I've filled it with trigger pods, ontop of the tanks already blooming population. I was feeding phyto to the tank as a whole, and the pods we're loving it, but have recently been instructed to stop because the "pods don't need feeding."

I'm new to this. My pod population is massive. Everyone and their mother knows a mandarin will bleed it dry though, and I'm hoping to try and farm up a supplemental population without having to spend retarded money.

Just secured an air stone and pump from a friend.

Do I need a heater? I've seen that they can survive in a large temperature window, so I'm going to try it without the heater for now.

I've got a lot more reading to do, but I will start a DIY thread as soon as I start, Shane.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Archit]

Like Bryan mentioned, it can crash quick Had it happen when we were raising clown babies.

We used 5 gallon buckets -- as I always do, we went overboard and was raising tisbe, tangerine, rotifers, and a couple of others -- had a total of 7 buckets going lol 2 for phyto (nano and ..? one more that was brown), and 5 different strains of pods. Initially everything was happy and dandy, but after a week or two, I started getting lazy and that's when problems started happening.

What worked:
-- We kept them at room temperature (no heaters)
-- We had 1 airstone in every bucket, with air output controlled via gang-valve
-- We were feeding them phyto from the phyto culture every day to every other day
-- Storing some pods from every culture (basically every day) in the fridge in-case of a crash in the grow-out system

What didn't work:
-- Need to clean the buckets every day or 2 days max (they started dying creating an ammonia spike crashing the entire culture)
-- Cat and Dog fur in the bucket
-- Need to clean the buckets every day or 2 days max (they started dying creating an ammonia spike crashing the entire culture) (mentioning this again on purpose)
-- Annoyed wife from having half the fridge full of bottles with phyto and pods
-- Having to completely wash my hands, top to bottom, after working on each bucket, so I don't cross-contaminate the cultures ... especially when going from pods to phyto ...

But really, as long as you can keep up with the cleaning and harvesting, I think you'll have fun. I didn't use a sieve to harvest them -- I tried it but didn't like it -- water took forever to go through those tiny holes and I'm a very impatient man; I just ended up taking water out of the buckets because all the pods were floating around anyway, and replacing the water. Maybe this was the reason my cultures crashed one after the other? who knows ...

My advice:
-- Keep it simple; grow tisbe or rotifers (they were the hardiest and easiest to grow)
-- If possible, use a cone shaped item (maybe upside down soda bottle) so that to get rid of the "dead" stuff, you can just open a valve and be done. OR have a couple of containers and keep rotating them. Having to clean the bottom of the bucket and walls with a sponge everyday was a PITA

I think that's about it ... if anything else comes to mind I'll post.

Hope that helps!

- Archit

 

[mvallee]

I tried and was successful for a while in a 5 gallon acrylic tank with an airstone. I started it off by adding macro's from my fuge caleurpa, dragons breath, cheato and fed phyto daily. everything went well for about a month and the populations exploded but the macro's choked out the little tank and almost lost everything. I culled out all the macro's other than 3-4 2-3" balls of chaeto and everything did well again.

I never did find a good way to harvest the pods. the best way I found was to take a container of tank water from my DT and pull the chaeto out and swish it around in the tank water, I would get a pretty good collection. This would not have been sustainable because after a while that pod tank got stinky even with regular water changes and I was always concerned with cross contamination to my DT, I would have needed to figure out a way to transfer contents to a new container so the old could be cleaned on a regular basis and that is where I gave up.

I tried the sieves during water changes but never really saw anything in the sieves. The whole thing crashed about a month in and have not revisited and would not do it this way again.

If I had to do it again I read an article about replicating a tidepool like where they naturally live, shallow container like a Pie pan and with 2" of water no aeration needed but you would need a bunch of containers and constantly rotate, feeding is tricky but sounds like once you figure it out and get a good system very sustainable, more research required on this one.

I switched over to hatching baby brine. as long as you feed shortly after they hatch, like 24 hours from adding eggs to harvesting they are nutritious and my mandarin, dragonettes and wrasses would get real busy pecking after I put them in so I knew they were eating them but the mandarin while in QT would never fatten up even hatching them every day for him so not sure long term if that would have been a good strategy.

From what I read like archit stated Tisbe are the best, smallest but most likely to be self sustaining the tigger pods although larger are not so easy to get to multiply.

good luck and if you figure it out definitely share