Saturday, September 7, 2013

Faith and Fabio's first larval run.

Today is day 1 of the first larval run of Faith and Fabio. The eggs for this run were collected on Thursday evening, September 5 at 10:30 pm about 20 minutes after spawning. I estimated approximately 500 to 600 eggs were collected.
On Friday morning I siphoned out 118 dead eggs and the rest of the eggs spent the rest of the day incubating in an eight liter plastic tub. (large pretzel jar from Costco). It was a warm day and the eggs hatched before I got home from work so I was not able to get an accurate count. (It's much easier to count eggs than newly hatched larvae). The newly hatched larvae were transfered by beaker to the larval tank.
This morning the larvae look good and most are hanging vertically in the water column which is normal. Some ciliates from an old copepod culture were added to the larval tank so that they may reproduce and be available as food for the larvae when the larvae are ready to feed which will most likely be the end of day 3 or beginning of day 4. I also added some wild plankton screened to less than 100 microns that I collected from Kaneohe Bay. And some microalgae was added to keep the plankton fed.
This is considered a small number of eggs to start a larval run with but is worth doing to get a feel for this species of larvae and I hope I learn something from it! :)

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