Thanks for all the replies. We will have to see what I come up with.

like everyone else says, i doubt you can keep a fish in the same tank as its food and not see the population vanish. that said, a separate ten gallon or enough buckets and such and you may be able to sustain a tank off of what you can grow. i have two tanks that are fed nothing but stuff that comes out of the live food tub.

even for raising very small fry, you normally have to keep the food separate. their presence alone releases kairomones that can crash most aquatic live food cultures.

if you have a microscope to look at them, try just getting the pond muck and water and just leave the lights on 24/7. if you end up with green water, keep watching it closely for a couple weeks and see if there is anything swimming in it. if not, go find some dirt from a vernal pool source and seed it till daphnids appear.

nothing else, you can pm me and ill send you some moinas. i already sent some to bev and they arrived alive and well, so it should make it to you just fine.
its more fun to see what you can find first though...

if you absolutely cant find anything useful, pm me and ill send you some of my mixed culture. i dont check this site enough, so pm me at aquarium forum as well if i dont respond.

Thanks I am going to try that. I do have a microscope so I could really get into this. About how long do you think it will take with 24/7 light to start seeing some action.

I it did this and the amount of life is amazing! I have seen in 5 minutes some type of a small leech amphipods Daphnids cyclops and a bunch of other things.

let it go for a while and something will become dominant. it will probably go through stages, with different critters becoming the most numerous species until it levels out. if you want to feed them something, go ahead and feed it however you want. whatever species likes the food you give the tank will end up being the one that takes over. whatever you end up with will probably be useful one way or another for feeding fish.

Right now, there is an abundance of scuds and cyclops, but I think I will start feeding crushed fish flake. I am pretty sure they are using up the natural food sources in the bottle.

Trade you my link for yours LOL...
http://www.ebay.com/...984.m1423.l2649
Does anyone have a link to any site for copepods etc. This one will work but I'd like more info plus a reasonably priced site for say tubiflex(live) worms. I already know a lab supply but the cost is astronomical.
I have also gone through the trouble of building a bio-filter which does not filter out particles or fish fry or Ghost shrimp fry just so that I can have these things in my tank. I'm new to this forum and did not know
most of the things talked about on here so for the past three years I've had one Banded Pigmy sunfish in a ten gal tank. There have been about 8 tropical fish with him but two or three at one time. I never fed
him at all till he was almost full grown and did not see him(sometimes for as much as three weeks) hardly at all till full grown. Never saw him eat fish food flakes but have seen him eat frozen bloodworms and
mosquito larva. Believe that he grew/survived on copepods and such as I still see him watching the bottom and sides of his tank for them.

Does anyone have a link to any site for copepods etc.

I bought freshwater 'cysts' (eggs) of ... rotifers? copepods? moina? I forget exactly what they were called. They were small bugs that hatched upon contact with water. They were on aquabid, being sold dry in vials. I think this is a different seller, but here is a link:
http://www.aquabid.c...odbs
The vials that I ordered had a good hatch rate. I still have little bugs today in my tank from that one purchase I made years ago. I ordered 10 vials and whenever I set up the tank after moving, I add one to the water.

Edited by EricaWieser, 21 February 2013 - 06:38 PM.