Podnip is a new powdered copepod food suitable for the culture of Tisbe, Tigriopus, and Apocyclops copepods!
Sustainable Aquatics President, Matthew Carberry, elaborated on this new copepod feed. “This product is another example of something we developed for in-house use that we are also sharing with others. The principal reason for Podnip‘s existence is to help us grow large, dense cultures of nutritionally-rich copepods for the breeding of marine ornamental fish here at Sustainable Aquatics (SA).”
“Our best results have been in combining this feed with live phytoplankton, although as a stand-alone feed, it has worked well. The convenience of maintaining copepod cultures without live or preserved algae is an attractive quality of Podnip.”
How Was Podnip Developed?
Carberry explained, “SA’s Podnip was developed in-part by piggybacking on the technology for processing and sizing of feed that we use for SA’s Amplifeed Replete rotifer feed, which we use in-house as a rotifer feed and enrichment to grow our rotifers (typically 1/2 billion per day is needed to support the hatchery). The recipe for Podnip is different and is geared to serve the specific nutritional requirements and metabolic ability of copepods; for instance, copepods, unlike rotifers, can synthesize astaxanthin from precursor carotenoids, which we have included in Podnip. Ingredients were also selected from a literature review to survey what is being used successfully in laboratories doing research with these species. This makes Podnip not just a good feed for copepods, but it makes the copepods nutritionally-superior food for fish, whether larval fish or adults.”
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