How to grow ciliates. =Live dust for fry=

Those who have not yet forgotten their school biology course will say with confidence that this is the most complex of single-celled organisms in its structure. That is, they come close to multicellular in terms of development. However, those who are interested in breeding slipper ciliates at home are not biologists.

Why is ciliate needed and what is it?

First of all, the length of the ciliate does not exceed half a millimeter, and its configuration is similar to a shoe sole (hence the name). In nature, the slipper ciliate serves as the main food for fish fry, which are simply too tough for larger pieces of food. This is why it attracts the attention... not only of the fish themselves, but also of fishermen and aquarists.

How to grow ciliates at home?

Any living creature, even a single-celled one, needs food. The slipper ciliate is no exception. The nutrient medium for it is microorganisms. This means that it is necessary to prepare an environment where they will be present in sufficient numbers. Take any container and pour aquarium water into it. Try to collect it closer to the surface where the plants come out. Almost every aquarium with a formed biological structure already has its own ciliates, even if there are only a few of them for now.

Next, add lettuce leaves or pieces of banana peel to the container. Sometimes algal fish food (granular) is mixed in with them. You can always buy it at almost every specialized retail outlet. Some experts recommend separating these types of food into different containers.

Both crops must be kept in the sun for at least a week (if longer, even better). The optimal time for growing ciliates is therefore summer. When the water turns dark, it is a sign that a bacterial colony has developed. Next, ciliates come into play. You can track their appearance even without microscopes and magnifying glasses: the water should turn pinkish.

Everything worked out? You can propagate a colony by taking another container with a similar bacterial culture and adding some water from the first one. The fry need to be fed literally with drops of water from the container where the ciliates live. If you add more food than the fry can eat, the shoes will simply die, and their decay products will poison the water. Of course, it is better to start with water from an open reservoir, where there are many more ciliates. And in any case, it is advisable to have a microscope to accurately assess the content of microorganisms.

Ciliate slipper belongs to the type of ciliates (Infusoria), which has over 7 thousand species. Compared to other groups of protozoa, ciliates have the most complex structure, being the pinnacle of the organization of unicellular animals. Slipper ciliates live in almost all freshwater bodies and are part of the “dust”. They can easily be detected under a microscope among silt particles and the remains of rotting plants taken from the aquarium.

Among the simplest ciliates, slipper ciliates are quite large organisms, the sizes of which usually range from 0.1 to 0.3 mm. The slipper ciliate got its name due to the shape of its body, which resembles a lady's slipper.

It maintains a constant body shape due to the fact that the outer layer of its cytoplasm is dense. The entire body of the ciliate is covered with longitudinal rows of numerous small cilia, which make wave-like movements. With their help, the shoe floats with its blunt end forward. A groove with longer cilia runs from the anterior end to the middle of the body. At the end of the groove there is an oral opening leading into the pharynx. Ciliates feed mainly on bacteria, pushing them towards the mouth with cilia. The mouth opening is always open. Small food particles penetrate through the mouth into the pharynx and accumulate at its bottom, after which the food bolus, together with a small amount of liquid, breaks away from the pharynx, forming a digestive vacuole in the cytoplasm. The latter goes through a complex path in the body of the ciliate, during which food is digested.

In addition to bacteria, ciliates feed on yeast and algae. When feeding them with algae, you should avoid exposure to direct sunlight, since the oxygen released by the newly ingested algae can rupture the ciliates. It should be borne in mind that ciliates can filter and swallow any particles, regardless of their nutritional value. Therefore, the presence of foreign suspended particles in the vessel with ciliates should be avoided, since by filling their mouth with foreign suspension, the ciliates may die.

Ciliate slipper quite mobile. The speed of its movement at room temperature is 2.0 - 2.5 mm/sec. This is a high speed: in 1 second the shoe covers a distance exceeding the length of its body by 10-15 times. This circumstance must be taken into account when feeding small, sedentary larvae of some spawning fish, which, even with a high concentration of ciliates, can remain hungry.

To breed ciliates at home, it is better to use a pure culture, having first verified its purity under a microscope. If a pure culture is not available, you can obtain it yourself. To do this, place a few drops of a suspension of sludge with plant debris taken from the bottom of the aquarium on the glass, to which a drop of milk or a grain of salt is added. Next to it, from the direction of the light, a drop of fresh, settled water is dripping. Both drops are connected by a water bridge using a sharpened match. The shoe rushes towards fresh water and light at a faster speed than all other microorganisms. The slippers reproduce very quickly: to achieve their maximum concentration of 40 thousand specimens/cm from one single individual, under optimal cultivation conditions, it takes less than a month.

For breeding slippers, all-glass vessels with a volume of 3 liters or more are usually used. Good results are achieved at room temperature, but the peak reproduction of ciliates is observed at 22 - 26 ° C. In the first days of cultivation, weak blowing is desirable, but sediment should not rise from the bottom of the jar. If there is a purge, the ciliates are located in the lower part of the jar, and if there is a lack of oxygen, they rush to the surface of the water. This property is usually used to concentrate ciliates before feeding them to larvae.

As food for ciliates, you can use hay infusion, dried peels of banana, pumpkin, melon, yellow swede, carrots cut into circles, fish feed granules, milk, dried lettuce, pieces of liver, yeast, algae, i.e. those substances that are either directly consumed by shoes (yeast, algae) or are a substrate for the development of bacteria.

When using hay, take 10 g of it and place it in 1 liter of water, boil for 20 minutes, then filter and dilute with an equal amount or two-thirds of the settled water. During boiling, all microorganisms die, but bacterial spores remain. After 2 - 3 days, hay bacilli develop from the spores, serving as food for ciliates. As needed, the infusion is added to the culture. The infusion is stored in a cool place for a month.

The shoe can be diluted on dried lettuce leaves or pieces of liver placed in a gauze bag.
The peels of ripe, undamaged bananas, melons, rutabaga, and pumpkins are dried and stored in a dry place. Before adding it to the culture, take a piece 1-3 cm in size, rinse it and add 1 liter of water. Hydrolysis yeast is added at the rate of 1 g per 100 liters. The simplest way is to breed the shoes in skimmed, boiled or condensed (sugar-free) milk: it is added to the culture (1-2 drops per 1 liter) once a week. Shoes use lactic acid bacteria.

When using the above feeds, it is important not to overdose the food. Otherwise, rapidly multiplying bacteria will leave the ciliates without oxygen. When ciliates are grown on bacteria, they have positive phototaxis, i.e. strive for the light. You can breed ciliates on scenedesmus and chlorella algae. Good results can be achieved when cultivating ciliates with weak blowing, when 1 granule of carp feed is added per 1 liter of algae. Ciliates fed with algae have negative phototaxis: they tend to the dark. This property can be used when feeding shade-loving fish larvae. Ciliate culture is used, as a rule, for no longer than 20 days. To continuously maintain the culture, it is charged in two jars at intervals of a week, with each jar being recharged every two weeks. For long-term storage of ciliate culture, it is placed in a refrigerator and stored at a temperature of + 3° - + 10°C.

Collection of ciliates is carried out in places of their highest concentration using a rubber hose. You can concentrate ciliates by carefully adding a saline solution to the culture, which, sinking to the bottom of the jar, causes the ciliates to concentrate at the surface. A simpler way to collect ciliates is to add milk to the culture while simultaneously turning off the blowing. After 2 hours, the ciliates are concentrated near the surface on the illuminated side of the jar.

Particularly good results can be achieved if the culture is placed in a cylinder, adding milk and salt. In this case, cotton wool is placed on the surface of the liquid and then fresh water is carefully added to the cotton wool, while the upper part of the cylinder is illuminated. After half an hour, most of the shoes are moved into fresh water and this water with ciliates is transferred to a vessel with fish larvae. To feed many characins and a number of other fish, the larvae of which cannot tolerate the presence of bacteria, ciliates are kept in clean water for a day or two. During this time, the shoes eat all the bacteria and thus disinfect the water.

To ensure a constant flow of ciliates into the aquarium with fish larvae, a jar with ciliates is placed above the aquarium and from it, through a hose with a clamp, water with ciliates drops into the aquarium with the larvae. You can transfer water with ciliates not with a hose, but with a moistened linen thread. Feeding of ciliates to the larvae of most fish is usually carried out only during the first two to three days with the gradual addition (on the second day) of larger food organisms.

We welcome everyone, the slipper ciliate, which is well known from school - it is a numerous inhabitant of reservoirs and at the same time the most valuable live food for aquarium fish. In addition to the high nutritional value of the slipper ciliate, its microscopic size is very important, because aquarium fish fry cannot eat larger foods.

Description and characteristics of single-celled organisms

The ciliate slipper (Infusoria) belongs to the species Paramecium Caudatum. These are single-celled protozoan animals with a microscopically small body size (0.1-0.35 mm); their species includes more than 8 thousand representatives. The reason for the peculiar name of the slipper ciliate was its appearance, whose outline resembles the sole of a shoe.

The shoes' diet consists of microscopic algae and bacteria, which the ciliates pass through the body along with water. The slipper ciliate feeds in motion, its mouth is always wide open, and food particles gradually accumulate in it. According to biologists, ciliates evolved from flagellates of prehistoric times.

Over the entire surface of the ciliate’s body there are small rows of cilia, which serve as its kind of “fins”. In order for the ciliates to move from place to place, the cilia produce oscillatory wave-like movements.

The speed of the shoe is such that in one second it covers a distance fifteen times greater than the size of the ciliate itself. The habitat of these protozoa are natural and man-made freshwater ponds in which there is no current.

In such reservoirs there is a lot of organic matter, which decomposes and thereby provides the protozoa with enough food. The slipper ciliate even lives in home aquariums. It can only be seen under a microscope.

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Ciliates as food

As soon as an aquarist gains a little experience, he immediately tries to breed his pets on his own. When fry appear in the aquarium, the problem immediately arises of what to feed them. And only living dust (plankton) suits them. Experienced aquarists say that the size of food for fish larvae (fry) should not exceed the size of the fry's eye.

Infusoria Paramecium Caudatum is an excellent food for aquarium fry and is suitable for almost all types of adult aquarium fish.

Nutritional value of ciliates:

• protein - 58.1%;
• fats - 31.7%;
• ash - 3.4%.

Where to get

There are two options for providing your fish with fresh and nutritious live food:

• purchase live dust from pet stores;
• breed ciliates yourself;
• catch small plankton in the pond with your own hands.

In pet stores or aquarium stores, live dust is sold along with liquid, per liter. To keep the food alive, it needs to be purchased approximately twice a week.

If you decide to catch live dust yourself, you need to purchase a special net with synthetic or silk fabric. The sparseness of such tissue should be fairly dense; the cells should be no thicker than 0.1 mm.
After the first intake of water into the net, you need to examine the collected liquid under a magnifying glass to find out if there is at least some living creature in it. If it turns out that the plankton is alive, then you can continue catching live dust. During the filtering process, tiny plankton remains at the bottom of the net.

As a result of such fishing, your living dust will consist not only of slipper ciliates, but also of larvae (nauplii) of cyclops and rotifers. The entire catch is placed in a glass jar with water and brought home.

Already at home, the brought live dust is once again filtered through nets with fabric of various densities. This will help sort the plankton by size. The caught plankton will remain alive for 5 days.

If you don’t have a great desire to run around ponds every week and look for food for your fish, then the best solution is to start breeding live dust at home.

Did you know? In the body of the slipper ciliate there are two nuclei: large and small. The large nucleus is responsible for movement and nutrition, and the small one is responsible for reproduction. Ciliates reproduce by division, and when this protozoan is ready to reproduce, its body stretches, forming a thin bridge in the middle, which eventually breaks. As a result of division, two adult individuals are obtained, which in due course will divide again.

How to breed

In order to start breeding ciliates at home, you first need to purchase material for propagating the culture. Where can I get it?

There are two options:

• ask for some slipper ciliates “for divorce” from a more experienced aquarist;
• catch it yourself in the pond using a net.

The best option is to take ciliates from a fellow aquarist. In order to scoop up more ciliates, water is taken from the very bottom of the aquarium, preferably closer to the algae growing at the bottom.
The breeding material taken from the aquarium will be clean, without foreign impurities. Indeed, in material taken from natural reservoirs, in addition to ciliates, various crustaceans are often found, which can destroy both shoes and fish larvae.

If you decide to get the breeding material yourself, then you need to get to the nearest body of water and scoop up some silt and water from the bottom. Place your loot in a jar and take it home.

For further work, you will need a small, even glass (5 by 10 cm in size), a microscope or magnifying glass, a syringe (pipette, disposable syringe without a needle), and a sharpened thin stick.

We take a drop of water from a jar brought from the pond and place it under a microscope (magnifying glass). Considering all this wealth, we will see many different types of protozoa - among them you can easily identify the shoe.

Next, use a pipette to collect a drop of clean, non-chlorinated water and place it on the same glass, close to the drop from the pond. Our task is to select several individuals of slipper ciliates from lake water and move them to clean water.

If you don't have the skill to do this with a pipette, you'll need to do it differently. Using a sharp wooden stick, we connect both drops (lake and clean) with a thin water channel.

The shoes love fresh water and will immediately move into a drop of clean water. Other protozoa are not very keen on clean water, so it will be mainly the slipper ciliates that will move around. This procedure can be repeated up to a dozen times and obtain a shoe culture free from pests.

After this, the selected ciliates must be placed in an incubator jar for reproduction. Before moving live dust into the jar, you need to fill the jar with clean water to half the volume and place it in a well-lit place.
An important point is that the jar should not be exposed to direct sunlight. To create a nutrient medium in the jar, you need to add a few drops of fresh milk (two to three drops).

The temperature in the room where the incubator jar will be installed can be normal room temperature (20-22°C). If the goal of the aquarist is the rapid reproduction of living dust, then you just need to raise the temperature in the room to 26-28°C: this will speed up the reproduction process several times.

In a warm nutrient medium, the slipper ciliate begins to multiply quickly. As food for the protozoa, a small piece of organic matter is dipped into the water; the most massive accumulations of ciliates occur right around it.

If a film forms on the surface of the nutrient liquid over time, which prevents the flow of oxygen into the jar, then the protozoa accumulate closer to the neck of the jar.

To create a nutrient medium in an incubator jar, you can use not only milk, but also dry banana or pumpkin peels, hay infusion, pieces of fresh carrots or fish feed (in granules). When the nutrient solution matures, a not very pleasant smell of fermentation appears in the room.
The classic recipe for propagating slipper ciliates on a banana: The banana peel is dried and stored in a container that is hermetically sealed. When the time comes to breed the slippers, the dry peel is taken, rinsed under cold running water and placed in an incubator jar, which has previously been placed in fresh water and some water from the aquarium (containing ciliates).

For 6 liters of water, take 1/3 of the entire banana peel from one fruit. Next, as usual, the container is installed in a bright and warm place. During the process of reproduction, the number of ciliates will increase exponentially.

Their numbers peak at 14-21 days (depending on the room temperature) and will remain at a high level for 20 days. After this time, the amount of living dust in the jar will steadily begin to decrease.

If an aquarist urgently needs live food, and it is impossible to wait for reproduction for several weeks, then the process can be accelerated. Place dry banana peels in a saucepan (the proportions are the same), pour boiling water over them, cover with a lid and leave until completely cooled naturally. The cooled contents of the saucepan are added to a jar with water and plankton. The jar is installed in a warm, well-lit place. The expected outbreak of ciliates occurs on days 6-7; their number is much higher than with traditional reproduction.

But the lifespan of the shoes obtained in this way is much shorter, so experienced aquarists add 3-5 of these jars at certain intervals. This helps to get an outbreak of live food by the desired date.

Milk infusion recipe: The second easiest way to prepare is to multiply live dust in whole milk without sugar (cream skimmed from milk is also suitable). Milk is added weekly to a jar of shoes and water at the rate of one or two drops per liter. Ciliates feed on lactic acid bacteria.

Important!When adding fertilizer, it is important not to overdose. In case of overdose, bacteria will begin to multiply too quickly and absorb oxygen intended for ciliates. If the shoes are grown on bacteria, they have pronounced phototaxis (the desire for light).

Hay infusion recipe: Take 10 g of dried and crushed herb (this is about two heaped tablespoons) and pour one liter of hot water. The mixture is brought to a boil, after which the heat is greatly reduced and the herbal infusion continues to simmer over low heat for 20 minutes.

When the mood boils, all microorganisms are destroyed in it, but bacterial spores retain the vital activity. The same amount of non-chlorinated, settled water is added to the finished broth.

After three to four days, the bacterial spores will develop into bacilli. This will be food for the breeding ciliates-slippers. The infusion is added to an incubator jar, where living dust multiplies. To store the infusion on hay, choose a cool and dark place; the infusion will not lose its shelf life within 30 days.

Seaweed recipe: Aquarists also breed slippers on chlorella and scenedesmus algae. A liter of algae is mixed with one pellet of carp feed. Ciliates that feed on algae cannot tolerate daylight (negative phototaxis).
This property of food with algae can be used when growing shade-loving aquarium fish or their larvae. Ciliates grown in this way live for about 20 days - to prolong the vitality of the culture, it is placed in the refrigerator. The optimal temperature for storing it is from 3°C to 10°C.

Another little-known method of propagating slippers: After cleaning the aquarium, the water collected from the bottom is poured into plastic bottles and placed in the sun. The water in the bottles turns green, and after a while the green settles to the bottom of the bottles. After this, you need to check the water with a magnifying glass for the presence of ciliates.

Usually this liquid contains a very large number of shoes, all of them large and fattened. By the way, you don’t need to add fertilizer for shoes to this crop for a week; the remains of rotting greenery will be enough to feed them.

How to give live dust to fish

To feed the fish, aquarists use a tricky trick: they place a piece of algae in a jar with the culture. After some time, a lot of ciliates gather around the plant, they are collected using a pipette and released into the aquarium to the fry waiting for food.

To feed young fish, you can also use a small two-cc disposable syringe without a needle. The jar with the multiplied ciliates is removed into the shade, after a while the shoes float closer to the surface.

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After which they are carefully collected using a syringe and transferred to the aquarium to the hungry fry. You need to add as much clean water to the jar as was lost as a result of selection. The water should not be chlorinated or boiled.

We must not forget that in the water, along with ciliates, there may be bacteria that they eat. It is undesirable for bacteria to get into the aquarium with the fry, so the collection of shoes for food should be done after the bulk of the bacteria has been eaten by them.

With a little effort and diligence, even a not very experienced aquarist will be able to establish the process of breeding slipper ciliates at home. The fry from his aquarium will always be provided with nourishing and healthy food.

If you have asked this question, then you have probably already had a successful spawning or is still in progress. I can congratulate you :) In this article I will tell you how I grew the ciliate slipper at home. Ciliates are an excellent food for juveniles, as the fry are very small at first and can only eat very small food. There may be ciliates in the aquarium, but their quantity is not enough to feed, for example, 100 fry. In general, I often did without ciliates, but in such cases I got few fish. You can simply buy ciliates at the poultry market; they are often sold in jars, but again the quantity is very small.

To grow ciliates normally, you need some tools, namely: a small basin, a microscope, bananas. You can take a simple iron basin; you will most likely find it in your kitchen. Bananas are quite simple - you can buy them at the supermarket. Of course, we don’t really need the bananas themselves; we successfully eat the bananas and leave only the peels. They will help us a lot in growing ciliates. A microscope is of course not necessary, but it won't hurt. I simply watched the process and could evaluate whether I had achieved anything useful. Because ciliates are very small in size, you simply won’t see them in water, but you will see them under a microscope. I took one from a friend, an ordinary old one, like we used to have in biology class at school. Ask your friends or just buy it for pennies at a flea market. You will still need it in the future.

We take an iron basin and place it on the windowsill, it is advisable to do all this in the summer, of course. I myself have never tried to grow ciliates in winter, so I can’t say anything useful about it. We pour water into a basin, for example from an aquarium. Place banana peels in water. Of course, you will immediately have a question: Where will the ciliates come from? That's right, they won't be there. They need to be put there. This is the biggest problem and here a microscope will help us a lot. I personally found old ditches with water in the park near my house. I took some water from there in cans and brought it home. I carefully examined the water samples under a microscope and found ciliates there. Of course it didn't work the first time. Before that, I brought home different water twice, but there was nothing there except dirt.

Something like this should happen, it just won’t work, it all depends on the microscope

Now we pour this water with ciliates into our basin, where the banana peels are floating. Banana peels will precisely create the conditions for the development of our food. Let's leave this whole thing for a week. After a week, we take a water sample and look through a microscope. As a result, I achieved a fairly large concentration of these organisms in the water. That is, I took a drop of water and there were always ciliates there. Now you can feed the fish. Scoop water from the basin into a glass and pour it into the aquarium with the fry. Naturally, you need to add fresh water to the basin, but not a lot, and make sure that the water does not evaporate. That's all. Maybe I forgot something, of course, because I haven’t done this interesting activity for a long time. If you have any questions, you can ask them in the comments, and I will try to answer.

To begin, you need to acquire the necessary equipment. You will need several three-liter jars, an ordinary medical syringe, instead of the plastic tip of which a glass pipette tip is inserted, a warm room T-26 * C, with soft, indirect sunlight.
Not a large piece of glass and a lens (the size of the shoes is from 0.1-0.3 mm).

There are many ways to breed slippers, using banana peels, hay, milk, dried lettuce, and yeast.
In milk, the slipper culture multiplies and develops more quickly, but also disappears quite quickly. On a banana peel (which needs just a little S = 1-3 cm2), the culture lives longer, but it also takes longer to grow, but there is a huge plus, there may not be milk in the house, and the peel of a ripe banana needs to be dried and can be used quite for a long time.

Shoe culture.
If everything is quite simple with the technical part of the process, then everything else will have to be dealt with literally point by point.
Firstly, where can I get the slipper culture?
There are several options.
The easiest one is to ask your older comrades for it.
The advantages are simply huge.
Firstly, you know that you were given a pure culture without various crustaceans that can not only benefit, but also kill the slipper culture, i.e. you receive obviously clean material to work with. Or go to a pond and scoop up water at the very bottom (preferably not a lot of silt).

If you chose the second option, here you will need a piece of sheet glass (5*10 cm), a magnifying glass or a microscope, a pipette or syringe, and a sharpened match.
First, take a drop of water and place it under a microscope, in it you will see a cluster of various protozoa, and you can also easily distinguish shoes.

The shoes are quite mobile.
Take a drop of clean water (with a pipette) and place it next to a drop from a pond.
If there are a lot of protozoa, try to select the part where only ciliates are present (you only need a few full-fledged individuals), so if you are not able to separate them with a pipette, then use the tip of a toothpick to connect 2 drops of water with a small channel, unlike other protozoa, ciliates will quickly swim across it, into fresher water.
By repeating this several times, you can obtain a fairly pure culture of ciliates.

Incubator
After this, you need to place the culture in an incubator,
Half a jar of clean water is enough; the jar is placed in a warm, illuminated place, but not in direct sunlight.
As a nutrient, 1-3 drops of milk are dripped into the jar.
And a culture of ciliates is placed, which begin to multiply quite quickly.
Ciliates feed on bacteria that serve as food for them, so they often accumulate around pieces of organic matter, or near the surface if a bacterial film occurs or if there is not enough oxygen.

This method is often used by aquarists to collect ciliates.
It is enough to place a small stem of a plant from the aquarium in a jar and shoes will begin to accumulate around it, which are collected with a pipette and placed as food for fish fry.
It should, however, be remembered that along with the water that you collect from the incubator, bacteria that the ciliates feed on can also enter the spawning tank, so in order to secure this process, you should first wait until the ciliates eat the bulk of the bacteria, and then feed the fry with them .