How to Culture Daphnia for Your Fish?

Nothing beats feeder cultures in terms of producing fish food for your aquarium fish. Commercial food is often packed with additives and is highly processed, which destroys many of the nutrients that your fish need. This is why so many people rely on live foods as the primary source of sustenance for their aquatic pets.

Today, we will discuss daphnia cultures. How do you set one up, how to maintain it, and how do you harvest the micro-creatures effectively?

But let’s start with the beginning.

What are Daphnia?

Daphnia are tiny planktonic crustaceans and are most widely known as water fleas. The creature’s name comes from Daphne, a naiad nymph in Greek mythology, which essentially made it a minor water goddess.

Daphnia only grow up to 5 mm, although most will remain around 3 mm in their adult form. Visually, these creatures don’t look like your typical crustacean. They are somewhat similar to a flea in terms of overall body structure and shape, which is where the association comes from most likely. They are bulky with a large abdomen and small heads, decorated with several thoracic appendages.

These animals can spread in the thousands in even the smallest environments, and they’re rich in protein and fat. These facts alone make them ideal as feeder animals for most fish species.

What do Daphnia Eat?

Daphnia rank as filter feeders, which means that they consume micro-particles floating in the water. These particles include general detritus, algae residues, and plankton, among other things. In essence, they’re easy to feed because they are highly adaptable and opportunistic eaters.

How to Start a Daphnia Culture?

The following represents the essential steps to setting up an optimized daphnia culture:

• Preparing the container – Get a glass container, preferably a spare tank, for ease of surveillance. Go for 5-20 gallons, depending on your scope and how large you want the daphnia population to get.
• Prepare the water – You should dechlorinate the water completely because daphnia are excessively sensitive to chlorine. Use a dechlorinator or boil your tap water and allow it to cool off to eliminate any traces of chlorine. Go for a pH level of 6.5 to 8.5 and a temperature around 65-72 F.
• Get a bubbler – Stay away from mechanical filters because these can suck in your tiny daphnia, especially since they like to swarm the tank’s upper levels near the surface. A sponge filter will be great in this sense.
• Prepare the daphnia – You can get daphnia from fish stores, and they come in small, ready-to-use packages. Make sure you allow the daphnia to adapt to the water’s temperature by placing the bag in the tank water for about 30 minutes. The gradual heat transfer will allow for a safe transition. Once the 30 minutes have passed, let the daphnia go free in the environment.

Once the culture is set up, consider the following maintenance tips:

• Mind the feeding – You can use yeast to feed your daphnia daily. I recommend several pinches of yeast per day (2-3), depending on the culture’s size. The water will always become a bit cloudy from the yeast, but it should clear up within several hours, as your daphnia consume the nutrients. If the water is still too cloudy the next day, you’re overfeeding your daphnia, so you should adjust the meal size or frequency.
• Algae are good – Green algae are actually beneficial to your daphnia because they use algae as a food source. You can accelerate the development of green algae by adding some liquid plant fertilizer in the tank water. Liquid fertilizers are great for supporting algae growth.
• Water changes – One water change of 10-20% weekly should be enough to keep the habitat well-aerated and clean. Don’t change more than 20% of the water in one session, and don’t perform too frequent water changes. Most importantly, only use dechlorinated water to avoid poisoning the daphnia.
• Avoid massive environmental changes – Daphnia need stability more than anything else. Drastic changes in water temperature, pH, or mineral content can throw them off and cause them to die in bulk. Monitor the health of your daphnia population and only intervene if it seems that the daphnia are dying at an accelerated rate.
• Harvest time – A thriving daphnia population will allow you to harvest around 25% of the total members daily or once every 2-3 days. It depends on the population’s size and overall health.

How do You Know if a Daphnia Culture is Dead?

The most tell-telling sign is the presence of dead daphnia accumulating in large numbers on the substrate. A thriving, healthy culture should contain daphnia of various sizes floating in the water. Daphnia never rest on the bottom of the tank, so noticing them immobile on the substrate in large numbers is a clear sign that the culture has crashed.

There may be many reasons, but water parameter inconsistency is the most common one. Dangerous fluctuations in temperature, pH, and overall water quality can cause the daphnia to die, crashing the culture along with it.

This is why you should always have several daphnia cultures in place in case one culture fails.

How to Harvest Daphnia?

Daphnia spend most of their time near the water surface, making them very easy to collect. You can use a fine strainer net to gather as many daphnia as you can and place them in a separate bowl for later use.

Or you can pour them directly into the fish tank if you harvest them near the feeding time. Don’t worry about getting too many of them. You should typically collect at least 25% of your daphnia once per day, because these little creatures multiply fast. They will restore their thinned ranks immediately after harvesting them.

How to Maintain a Daphnia Culture?

The maintenance process is quite straightforward. Just follow these tips:

• Weekly water changes – You should change up to 20% of the total water volume every week to prevent the daphnias’ water from getting cloudy and dirty. Keep in mind to use dechlorinated water in the process.
• Do not clean the substrate – The substrate will contain a lot of organic matter. Much of this consists of dead daphnia and food residues, but it will also contain daphnia eggs. You don’t want to remove those from the environment since you will be sabotaging your daphnias’ reproductive efforts.
• Keep water parameters stable – The water temperature should remain stable around 70 F, give or take, with a pH between 7.0 and 8.0. These are ideal breeding conditions for daphnia and allow the culture to expand fast.
• Be careful about the meal size – Daphnia are fast eaters, but they cannot consume a lot of food. Only serve them several pinches of yeast per day to prevent excessive food residues and water pollution.

After all is said and done, your daphnia culture will eventually fail, despite all your valiant efforts. If that happens, you simply reset the culture and rely on your spare cultures to take over in the meantime. So, yea, have at least one spare culture available.

Can You Start a Daphnia Culture Without a Starter?

Despite what you may read online, I would say that starting a daphnia culture without a starter is close to impossible. It’s not quite impossible because I guess you can achieve it, but it takes a long time, and it’s mostly a game of chance. Some people recommend keeping a bowl of water outside with some grass inside and waiting it out. Daphnia should appear after some time.

But what does ‘some time’ actually mean? Nobody knows for sure. Some claim it can take days, other weeks, while others state that it takes months. In many cases, no daphnia will appear at all. So, it most likely depends on where you live.

Then you have the problem of unwanted contamination. The idea is to keep the container outside, where many other insects can contaminate the water. So, even if you do get daphnia, you will also get a lot of unwanted hitchhikers on the side.

I recommend getting a starter, especially since these are easy to find and cheap.

Conclusion

Daphnia are great for your fish since they are rich in protein, carbs, and fats and have healthy amounts of vitamin A and D. These provide the fish with valuable nutrients, especially during their early developmental phases.

As you can see, daphnia cultures are quite easy to set up and maintain, and they require minimal investments along the way. There’s no reason not to have at least several of them in place.