Common water fleas

I know because I've done it many times, and it's pretty cool to watch.

The greatest beauty of this approach is that the identical osmotic shock, you know, cool, low TDS water that triggers the Achilles fish to hatch also awakens your Daphnia, your copepod, and paramecium cysts.

Annual killifish fry are born relatively large and possess a quick metabolism to complete their life cycle before the pool dries up again.

By timing the hatch concurrently, your fry will emerge directly into a swimming soup of infusoria and tiny noplei.

Their nutritional value is almost entirely dependent on what they consumed in the hours right before you harvested them.

So a Daphnia that has been swimming in a clean tub of clear water for three days is essentially an empty, starving shell.

Just roughage.

Exactly.

It provides roughage, but very little energy.

But a Daphnia that just spent the morning gorging on nutrient rich green microalgae, that is a highly nutritious package.

So feeding only live food is like eating nothing but fresh wild berries and raw kale.

Like, sure, it's completely natural and unprocessed, but you might actually be missing out on the fortified vitamins, calcium and complex proteins you get in a carefully balanced pre-made meal.

Nitrogen.

And then that's growing the smallest animals, which are the zooplankton, like water flea, those tiny little, uh, Daphnia, and then little fish, which we call planktivores, and the big fish, the piscivores.

So that zooplankton, kind of the middle level of the food chain.

In class, uh, John would talk about how those zooplankton could migrate vertically, uh, during the day.

and That was something very interesting, yeah, and that had to do with the composition of the mud.

And then when we had the discussion, certain mud ponds, yeah, were thriving more than other ones, yeah, because they could not catch so much Daphnia.

And that had to do with probably the composition of the mud.

Wow.

Okay.

So like Daphnia do almost.

Yeah, kind of.

Yeah.

Its parasitoid is a little less than a millimeter, and its hyperparasitoid is a little smaller than that.

And I collect in rear, and then I collect these sticky traps, and I, like, have to find them on there, and then I have to remove them from the sticky trap and clean them, and then pin them.

So that's, like, the size of, like, a baby Daphnia.

Yeah.

It might be safe for some adult neocaridina.

But controlled ecotoxicity studies show that certain microscopic crustaceans, like Daphnia, are exquisitely sensitive to it.

Furthermore, fenbendazole is routinely reported by hobbyists in public aquariums to completely wipe out ornamental snail populations.

So if a medication label boldly says, Invoort safe, I can't just trust that and leave my mystery snail in the tank alongside my cherry shrimp.