Fresh, live food is widely regarded as being more nutritionally complete
than synthetic feed. There's also pride in growing your own food to
feed yourself and all your pets, and peace of mind in knowing what goes
in it.
The auction is for a species of freshwater zooplankton
native to New Zealand and many other places. Give it standard aquarium
or pond water conditions, add a source of nutrients to support the
growth of suspended microorganisms, and then you can support yourself
(or your fish/axolotls/utricularia) with a perpetually-renewing source
of food.
In truth all you need is one LIVE female individual to
guarantee yourself a colony, however having an auction for just one
daphnia seems a little unconventional. I'll stick with convention to
keep conventional people happy; this auction is for between 20 and 100
daphnia (population will more than triple within a week). More can be
added (up to 100 small ones per litre by courier) but will result in
quicker asphyxiation during transit.
I once had a colony of
Ceriodaphnia or Moina spp. which grew to an ideal size for small fish
(~1mm max, c.f. ~4mm D. carinata). If you know of anyone culturing them
or in a local water body I'd be glad to know.
Currently I'm
co-culturing a cyclopoid copepod and a Physid snail with a pretty shell
that does a great job keeping the sedentary algae down. The cyclops is
around Moina size or smaller so is good for smaller egg-layer fry once
they get past the infusoria stage. I can add a pair of cyclops or
Physid snails to the daphnia bottle.
Original source was PNBHS
biology department, before then a stock trough in the Manawatu region
most likely. My NCEA Level 3 Biology internal some years back was a
report on the response of these to different wavelengths of light.
To allow for the inter-semester break the next auction will be on the 9th of July. Good luck to those who have exams.
Just an aside, baby WCMMs do indeed look like neon tetras. It's quite entertaining to watch them stalk infusoria dots.
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