How to raise food for the fry.
What you need before you can actually care for the Ocellaris fry. You will have to have the foods necessary for their survival. This a little about what you will have to get and have to do to make it live. This is where a lot of people fail just make sure you are ready for this. Green Water is made different ways by different people.
This is the method of raising food for their clownfish fry, but we will describe what has worked for us Newly hatched clownfish fry need to eat some where around 1000 rotifers a day in order to form properly and thrive. In order to support the large amounts of rotifers needed to feed clownfish fry, you will need to raise them yourself. In order tomaintain a rotifer population you will need green water. Live saltwater rotifers can be purchased online, but the price can really get high. The overnight shipping is really crazy, so just grow your own.
For this setup you will need a few things like a culture of saltwater micro algae, some prefer Nannochloropsis. You may be able to get these cultures local fish store or you can order them online. The cultures we have got arrive dry in little petri dishes. You first pour sterile saltwater into the petri dish to get the algae to start growing, completely covering the algae culture. You can obtain sterile saltwater one of two ways. You can use distilled water from the store or you can simply microwave premixed aged saltwater for about 7 to 9 minutes depends on the microwave. Next you pour the water into the petri dish, first make sure it has cooled down to room temperature.
Once you have added the water the dish should be covered and left under the lights for the next 24 hours. After this the algae can be scraped off of the dish. We have found using a sterile Q-tip work just fine, into a 2 liter bottle or two 1 liter bottles of sterile saltwater. For the best results you need to have the water aerated. This bottle(s) should be placed under both a white and actinic light for the best algae growth. The algae should have light for at least 12 hours a day. One of the best ways to aerate is done in the following manner: The use of a glass bead air stones that produces course bubbles. If you try to use the wooden air stone it produces bubbles that are too fine and it can damage the algae cells which will hinder reproduction of the algae. The air stone needs to be placed at the center bottom of the bottle(s) and should be connected to rigid airline tubing. Flexible tubing can be used to connect the rigid tubing to the air pump. If you can not aerate the water, you will need to stir it for a min. of at least twice a day.
To make this simpler you need to have more bottles set up at the same time. This way you are sure to have enough to keep it growing and still have enough to feed the fry. You can connect several bottles together with a gang way valve connection. Then you can either start new bottles the same way as you started or you can use a portion of the first bottle’s contents after it has matured. Everyday we fed each of our rotifer tanks 1/2 bottle of green water for the smaller tank but for our new bigger tank we fed 1 bottle a day. You can leave a cup of water in the bottle and then you can begin a new green water culture in the same bottle. This is simply done by adding more sterile saltwater. We have read that some use a fertilizer called Micro-Algae Grow to aid the algae in its growth.