Green Water for Daphnia

Description

Green water is something you need to learn about if you are going to be serious about culturing predatory or scavenging aquatic insects or if you are culturing aquatic arthropods like Daphnia to feed to your fish, etc. You can read more on green water at this Wikipedia link and about how they form the base of freshwater food webs.

Buyer Beware: The only thing we are selling and shipping on this page is green water (Daphnia are sold separately on this website), but I list lower down on this page some other products with links for you to consider purchasing offsite, because they are helpful in supporting your culture of the green water you purchase from us. What we are selling through this page is simply 10 oz of green water which is a liquid w/o chunks of algae in it. We run it through a strainer, just to be sure. About 10 ounces for $9.99. It ships in a goosenecked (rubber banded) plastic fish bag, the same way we ship everything that must be shipped in water. We recommend one 10-ounce bag for each culture (bucket) you want to set up.

In short, green water is a wonderful food source for Daphnia. Daphnia are small, planktonic crustaceans that filter feed on the tiny algal organisms suspended in green water.

This is something you can source/make yourself rather easily by leaving a bucket or other water reservoir outdoors for some indeterminate period of time. Algae will find a way into the water and will activate and grow in the sunlight. This is more or less easy to do, depending on the season but it’s really just that simple. But, below I will tell you about how I optimize my growth of green water.

We offer the product here for your shrimp, copepods, Daphnia and other filter feeders that feed on it in the water column. It can be a critical component in setting up your colonies of filter feeders and often it is just easier to jump start your own green water culture by purchasing green water. Just add the volume we ship into any 1 to 5 gallon bucket, add more water to the depth level you desire, and let the sun or an artifical light (if indoors) do the rest.

There are some additional products that, though they are not necessary for you to use, will further jump start production for you. We use them because we are very serious about the quality of our green water since it is the base requirement for many of our aquatic insects groups that rely on Daphnia as feeders (and, again, Daphnia feed on green water). And we in turn want to educate and make everything available to you so that you will have the same success that we do.

We are linking you to the exact products that we use to jump start our green water cultures.

These are Amazon Affiliate links and we make well under a buck for each product, if you purchase it through our link. Zero pressure. Just being transparent and wanting to inform you about these products that we use but we have no intention of ever buying them in bulk and selling them on the website because we already have a ton of living products that keep us plenty busy.

Aqua Algae 8 oz Concentrated Guillard’s F2 Formula

And then another Amazon Affiliate product we use is

Instant Ocean Sea Salt

You can use a 10 gallon tank to grow your green water culture in, but save the expensive tanks for your pet bugs or fish! I personally use multiple 5 gallon buckets to maintain multiple colonies of green water and I will give you an affiliate link for that here too. I use white ones like these because I like to see the deep green color against the white background of the bucket. They come with lids, but I don’t use the lids. They are nice to have if you ever repurpose the buckets, though.

3 Pack of White Food Grade 5 Gallon Buckets

If you’d rather give this all a go in smaller, cheaper 1 gallon buckets (which works just fine), here is a 3 pack affiliate link for them. These are translucent which helps more light in. If you don’t have a lot of space for 5 gallon buckets, these 1 gallon buckets will still help you produce green water.

3 Pack 1 Gallon Food Grade Buckets

Let’s pause a moment and discuss the simplest process, again. You can leave a bucket of water outdoors and wait for it to turn green. Or, you can purchase the products above and jump start it all.

Another product I personally use for my green water culture set up is a bubbler. Simply put, it’s a tiny pump that pushes air through the water, keeping the water from stagnating. The point of it is really twofold. One, it helps to keep the suspended algal organisms in the water column moving around. This allows them to photosynthesize and grow and reproduce (and they grow exponentially). The other point of a bubbler is that it helps to break up any bacterial films, etc. that might otherwise grow on the surface and this helps with gas exhange too, between water and air. Some people claim that air stones can cause issues because the bubbles they produce are so fine and it somehow gets into the bodies of the Daphnia or traps them at the surface, but I’ve not personally made that observation. Of course, you don’t have to use an air stone at the end of your airline tube but I find they keep the water from stagnating better and I’ve used air stones in tanks as small as 1/2 gallon and observed nothing but explosive growth of the Daphnia in there.

There are a billion different types on the market but I use these little, cheap ones because well, they are the cheapest. Amazon Affiliate link, incoming…

Quiet Aerator Pump with Tubing and check valve

And that’s it. That everything you need, and maybe more than you need, to get serious about culturing green water.

To conclude, they only thing that we ship is the 10 oz culture of green water. All the other Amazona Affiliate links above are for products that we do not personally ship. Please let me know if you have any questions about this.