Friday, September 13, 2013

Day 6 of Faith and Fabio's first larval run.

Today is day 6 and unfortunately I have decided to stop this run.
Over the last two days the number of larvae have dwindled down to about three. It is time to clean everything up and restart. I feel that this was most likely caused by a bacterial infection that I didn't catch soon enough. We had plenty of food items of the correct size which is less than 100 microns. (Translation- the hole size in regular window screen is about 1000 microns (or 1 mm). So 100 microns is one tenth of the hole size of window fly screen.)

I did get photos of the remaining larvae for you to see.
Here is a 6 day old C. interrupta. Keep in mind that these larvae were not developing well over the last 2 days and you should see a difference in future photos of 6 day old larvae.

Here is a closer look. You can see that there is food in the gut but in a healthy larva the gut would be more full than this. Also note the pinkish hue which is vascular development. We should be seeing more of that if this were a healthy larva at 6 days old.

It should take about a week to clean up and get the live food cultures at the right stage. We need to have the adult copepods producing nauplii (baby copepods) for the larval fish to eat as their first food when they are at 3 to 4 days old.

Try Try Again!

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