Copepods are extremely important to a well balanced aquarium ecosystem, not only are they extremely beneficial, but they are also an important food source required by some species to survive.
Copepods and Amphipods are a natural part of the plankton food chain, so they will naturally occur in a saltwater aquarium. If you already have a well established tank you probably see many of the little guys on the glass of your aquarium, in the substrate and even on your rocks.
If your tank has not been going long you can easily buy them from many different online vendors. If you want to breed them like we do to ensure your population never depletes check out our YouTube video above.
Its not to hard to breed pods, just get a 10 galloon tank, have your salinity at around 1.023, temperature around 78 Degrees F, and add chaeto, they love to breed in the stuff, we even added a small amount of substrate and rubble from our live rocks, then some pinky's filter floss from our sump, they were already breeding in it in the sump so we simply transferred it over. We add phytoplankton til the water has a green tint, when the water begins to clear after a few days you just add more, giving the little guys plenty to eat. We also added a small amount of fish flakes or pellets just to ensure we have enough for them to eat. We add fresh Chaeto to their tank and only keep the lights on the pod tank about 2-4 hrs a day. To transfer our pods we will take a small bit of the water, pick up the chaeto and shake it out giving us several hundred at a time, sometimes we will use our Pod Condo, video below, it makes transferring pods extremely easy. Water Changes are very important when breeding pods, you don't want your parameters to get to crazy, and they always breed better right after a water change.
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