Green mandarin breeding (1 Viewer)

[Tangs]

Ya copepods in the bottle move and swim around. The yellow fixed dots are just that. No swimming and no movement. Other than that there is no sign of Copepods in my 125 tank. What salinity is your manderen tank at? Jim

 

[Tnconcept]

Wow good work Kat!

 

[tektite]

I keep the tank's salinity at 1.026.

 

[tektite]

Moved this thread to the Propagation and Breeding Forum.

 

[steveb]

SS, really. I'll be placing and order with seahorse.org soon for both SS and S and probably a couple others too.

I didnt know there is such SS type. I thought S type is the smallest. lol

Spare me some when u have ur culture going and have tooooo many.

There is an SS strain, though S seems much easier to find. I hope S isn't too difficult to culture, definitely got plenty of L

I read your post last night and looked and all I could find was really old references and study done on food and environmental influences on the production of ss strain.

http://informedfarmers.com/rotifer-culture-for-finfish/

In this article the SS-strain rotifer was isolated from Centenary Lakes, Cairns. At the start of the program, reproductive females had an average lorica length of 151 ± 15 µm and width of 111 ± 10 µm....


The algae that produced the largest population of ss strain was Stichococcus. I was able to find Stichococcus bacillaris Nägeli on alaebase.org (http://www.algaebase.org/search/species/detail/?species_id=1044) and according to that site a culture can be obtained from UTEX $75 vial. http://web.biosci.utexas.edu/utex/

In the end I was able to find really small algea but not really small rotifers. Plenty of s strain but no ss.

I as able to find s-strain rotifers here
http://www.seahorsesource.com/cgi-bin/shop/search.cgi?&category=Foods-Live


Have you been able to find an ss strain?

 

[tektite]

No, I had found out about them while skimming the basic marine breeder.org basic overview of mandarin breeding. It looks like it hasn't been updated in a long time though. I'm just going to be getting some S strain from seahorsesource and probably get some copepod cultures at the same time.

 

[steveb]

I guess we need to have a Marsh event where everyone gets a plankton sieve and gets to wade around the bayou collecting samples and then someone gets to sit at a microscope trying to find the right sized little buggers.

Winner gets a gift certificate

 

[steveb]

Now that Mike is a famous nemo breeder maybe he could use his contact with Matt Pedersen to see if he knows of anyone that has isolated an ss strain and is willing to sell them...

 

[tektite]

My female looks like she swallowed a bowling ball, so I should be able to gather a bunch more eggs tonight

 

[steveb]

Just out of curiosity how did you get them to pair up?

 

[tektite]

I had the male for months, he was doing good so I got a female from FJW. She was a bit thin like most in stores, but not too bad since she had already started to eat mysis. She was smaller than him which helps too. Put them together, there was some chasing and nipping for a couple weeks, she just wanted food, he wanted a little more than that...but as she fattened up they paired up well. The main thing about getting a breeding pair of mandarins is making sure that they are well fed.

 

[steveb]

How did you sex them?

 

[Scott]

Its the dorsal fin, longer on the male (if I remember right)

 

[tektite]

The first dorsal fin -

In males, they have a spike like this:

The female's is rounded like my red scooter, no spike:

 

[steveb]

The main thing about getting a breeding pair of mandarins is making sure that they are well fed.

No doubt about that...

I think that is very cool! I have confidence you will get it all figured out and pretty soon your going to have Green Mandarins running out of your ears errr... tanks

 

[Ostentum]

I took am looking at the 100MM 2.8 Canon Macro, found a couple of used ones without IS for around $375, much better than paying $1000 for the IS ones, especially since I am going to shoot on a tripod to begin with. The guy at Houston Camera exchange told me the IS is worthless anyways, it doesnt work as well as it should and you will still get some blurring shooting by hand. Not sure how much truth is behind that but I usually take their advice.

 

[tektite]

Well, its usefulness will fall off with the closer shots are and the shallower the depth of field is. Not sure if its worth the extra cost for the IS. Here is a great review of the lens:

Canon EF 100mm F2.8 L IS USM Macro Review

 

[DustinB]

You should look into the tamron lenses, very popular alternative. That's what I use on my d90. Should be able to find them around $400 new.

 

[tektite]

I know, I'm just super fanatical about image quality. Especially with my full frame sensor, any little imperfections in the glass show up very well. I don't have the benefit of a lot of SLR's that have a field of view crop and don't use the edges of the lens.

 

[jamesw]

If you have not tried the Tamron 70-200 Macro lens you should try it. It's fantastic! It's every bit as sharp as the Canon 70-200 but it's also a macro lens. It is really more useful when fitted w/ the Canon 500D diopter.

Cheers
James