Marine aquarists are blessed with a gigantic selection of beautiful fish species to keep. Among these, only some are peaceful,
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Copepods
Copepods make up the crustacean arthropod subclass Copepoda. It is one of the most ecologically important groups of animals on the planet. This isn’t just because they are the most abundant animal species, nor just because they collectively make up the most biomass (which they do!). Rather, it is because most all freshwater and marine food chains ultimately lead back to them; this is because they are primary consumers, heavily grazing algae both from open waters and seafloors. In so doing, copepods transfer nutrients and biomass created by primary producers to predators higher up in the food chain. Just as these activities are so essential to the wellbeing of natural marine ecosystems, they are important in one’s saltwater aquarium.
Copepods benefit marine aquaria of all kinds in all sorts of ways. Most species, for example, make a great foundation for the clean-up crew. Their capacity for controlling detritus and nuisance algae is certainly impressive. As they grow and multiply, they become a highly nutritious live food source for an astoundingly broad range of aquarium animals. For example, as benthic types grow to adults, they are picked off of the bottom by small fishes such as green mandarins, six-line wrasses, etc. Larger planktonic types get picked off by zooplanktivores such as anthias. Tiny copepod larvae, which are almost universally free-living in the water column, serve as an excellent food source for many types of corals.
In this section, you will learn which type of copepod best suits your needs, how to add “pods” to your tank and how to keep a resident pod population flourishing indefinitely.
77 Posts
What Do I Need for a Saltwater Fish Tank?
Whether scouting for your first aquarium, or “graduating” from a freshwater aquarium, there is something about a saltwater aquarium
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Why Larval Pods are Better for Seeding (Even If You Can’t See Them)
Copepods (pods) are essentially required for any reef aquarium. They perform three important ecological tasks: (1) Graze on benthic
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Keeping a Coldwater Marine Aquarium
Marine aquarists have always had access to temperate species. In fact, in the days before improved packaging/shipping procedures
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When to Choose Poseidon’s Feast
Back in “the day,” to acquire a seed culture of copepods, aquarists would typically have to resort to scooping a couple cups of gravel
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Corals in a Box of Water: Creating a Natural Reef Tank
We’ve come a long, long way in advancing natural marine aquarium keeping. Those of us who started out in the 80’s with barren
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Gutloading Live Microcrustaceans
In the sense that very, very few animals specialize to eat only one thing, all animals are omnivores, and prefer live foods. For
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Why EcoPods are the Best Live Copepod Product Ever
Earth is a planet of pods. Wherever there is water, there are amphipods, isopods, branchiopods, and so on. Pods are an integral part of
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A Look at the Banded Pipefish
So many marine aquarium fishes can be exciting to watch; some are big and belligerent, some are beefy and bullish, some are lightning
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The Whole Package: Integrating AlgaeBarn’s Kits & Combos
AlgaeBarn is hardly the only aquarium hobby-centered business to produce phytoplankton and macroalgae. But we like to think that we’re
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Pod vs Sock: Do Mechanical Filters Kill Copepods?
Considering that aquarium keeping is a mere nerdy pastime, it can be surprising that there are so many contentious issues amongst
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4 Tips for Seeding Live Copepods
We get it… Copepods aren’t always cheap. Especially if you use a clean, high-quality, high-density, expertly packaged product with as
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Phytoplankton Species and their individual Strengths
When purchasing live foods for your tank, many people simply take the shop employee’s advice when handed a jar of unidentified copepods
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How to Acclimate Your Pods
Particularly for animals that live in water, acclimating from one environment to another--even if quite similar physically and
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Oithona: A Keystone Aquarium Copepod Species
In terms of both numbers and biomass, the copepods (Subclass Copepoda) dominate the zooplankton oceanwide. These minute crustaceans are
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Copepoda: The Ocean’s Cornucopia
In 1905, an engineering mishap caused the Colorado River to flood a shallow basin over the San Andreas Fault in California. With
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Gorgonians in the Marine Aquarium
It should go without saying that the hermatypic, stony, reef-building corals will dominate most reef aquaria. Thankfully, so long as
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Eliminating Detritus in the Refugium
Ever feel like no matter how much time you spend cleaning your tank, it can never really ever get clean? Detritus build-ups can be
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Copepods
Imagine for a second how food energy from grass, a primary producer, is transferred to a bluebird. The bluebirds don’t eat grass.
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Tig Pods: A Food for Many
The reef aquarium hobby continues to reach new heights. This is most evident by the extraordinarily beautiful systems we see on display
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