# Cleaning daphnia?



## v369 (Nov 14, 2010)

if you have green water on hand to feed them they will still be usable.
they feed on bacteria,and freefloating tiny algaes mostly.
daphina would not last the full week in a tank with no food, you would most likly have a die off at or on day 3,or they would produce resting eggs and die anyway.
i have fed my daphina cultures a slury of yeast and powdered spriulina when i have not had green water availible.
also if using suplmental air on the tank the daphina are kept in try to keep the bubbles larger as tiny bubbles can get caught in the daphinas exoskeleton and cause death in a roundabout manner.
hope this reply is not too jumbled


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## mistergreen (Dec 9, 2006)

If there's no fish around where the daphnia grew up, it's likely there's no fish parasites.

You can also quarantine the daphnia for a few weeks before feeding them to the fishes. That's one option.

Or you can net them and run tap water through them, in effect kill them with chlorine but that would kill any protozoan parasites as well.

ps. Daphnia is a good 'canary' species. If they're thriving, it's a good chance the the water is not polluted.


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## 9am53 (Jan 23, 2008)

Thanks. The water they are coming from has no fish that I know of. There are many turtles and muskrats and the like, but I don't think there are any fish. I just don't want to wipe out my cardy's and my RCS colony with some disease. I have tried unsuccesfully to start a green water tank, but I will try to get some of these guys to survive on spirulina and yeast...Wish me luck!


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## Nue (Dec 27, 2009)

mistergreen said:


> ps. Daphnia is a good 'canary' species. If they're thriving, it's a good chance the the water is not polluted.


+1 Daphnia are very sensitive, so they are good if the culture is thriving.


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## Dave-H (Jul 29, 2010)

I have start started culturing daphnia and have been reading about this. Evidently the risk is not so much that the daphnia have parasites/hitchhikers as that's very rare. Instead, it's unwelcome visitors in the water where they swim free, cling to debris, etc. The technique I decided on was twofold:

1) to keep the culture 'closed' by never introducing any outside water/sources of organisms. I only refill with treated tap or tank water.

2) to use the dilution technique to reduce the risk of unwanted organisms. I pour culture water with lots of live daphnia into a decanting vessel (just a big wide glass) and let it settle for a bit. then I gently pour out the top 80% or so of the water into another big glass, leaving the settled debris behind. then pour in more water to dilute the remains and the water is considerably clearer. you can repeat this until you think that you have cleaned up the water some. it's not really a definitive approach, but it seems to work well especially once you have a closed system with no way of new parasites, etc. being introduce.


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## Franco (Jun 13, 2010)

I collect my daphnia cultures from the wild in the spring and then keep them all summer. I just rinse them with tank water a couple times and then feed them. I've never picked gotten any diseases in my tanks from it.


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## v369 (Nov 14, 2010)

only issue i have had with wild collected daphina in any of my tanks was accidental introduction of a damslefly larva or 2(actualy ate some guppy fry before i had a chance to scoop him out and put out in the garden pond) and some predatory water beetle larva and the ocasional leech . 
if you make sure the container you have them in is large enough and give it a few hours to settle before you net out the daphnia most other critters should settle to the sides or bottom.the water beetle larvae are free swimming but big enough to easily seperate. 
i generaly collect my cultures in the spring from vernal pools so ive had lots of other things come in with them such as:
ostracods, clycopods, fairyshrimp, clamshrimp, hydra, amhipods, gammarus, fingernail clams, amphibious snails, misquito larvae and blood worms but they usualy end up fish snacks as well


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