Are Rotifers only for feeding Fry?

[Reef By Steele]

An R2R community member reached out to me and asked if i could do a thread about the benefits of adding rotifers to a reef tank. So I did some additional research to add to my own knowledge and experience. Please offer any experiences or additions that you have experienced in your own systems or experiences.


My first experience with rotifers was way back when I found my first batch of clownfish fry in February of 2023. You can see our experience in this thread under my original user name @HankstankXXL750, https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/first-time-i-have-found-clown-eggs.969665/.

I immediately jumped onto the vast dark recesses of the WORLD WIDE WEB. Wow just like everything else there are 700,000 answers to every question and 699, 990 are not worth the read lol. I had already fallen in LOVE with @REEF2REEF becoming a supporting and then partner member, and it waws well worth it, as that is where i actually found the information I needed. now we didn't do great, and our business has kept me from trying again, but we still have two of the original hatch and they are going to be in @Ocean_Queenie 's tank when she decides what she is willing to bite off

Rotifers are by far the most popular live food source for raising fry. And one of the easiest to culture, but very time consuming to do it right with high yield. We were able to keep a culture running, and that is how we were able to successfully raise our first babies. Once they out grew the rotifers, we shifted to BBS Baby Brine Shrimp, and they are also easy to produce with a lot less effort, but too large for the first few weeks with clown fry. But at this point I had a dilemma, as I wanted to keep the culture going for a future brood, but didn't want to have to harvest and clean the culture everyday to just waste them when i didn't have a use for them. This is when I reached out to my friends across the world right here on the Universes Greatest Reefing Forum.

I was quickly told that rotifers could be added straight to the reef and would have some awesome benefits. One great thing about rotifers is that they are extremely hungry little critters and become the smallest animal to join your CUC. Rotifers are veracious eaters and also reproduce in the zillions. In studies they have been found to prefer Cyanobacteria over other food sources, but that was in a river, so I am not making a claim that they will help with this, but since I have a tank with some cyano I am going to pull some and see what I can determine. I will create a thread on that in a few days. They also do a magnificent job of polishing the water. A reef tank with a healthy rotifer population is going to have really clear water, as they consume ciliates, bacteria, organic detritus and more.

But what about as a food source, will their population explode and overrun the tank causing issues that lead to bigger problems? No, rotifers populations will be kept in check through predation and limited by the amount of food they can available to them. So who preys upon them? Basically every thing in your tank (well almost). Pretty much all fish will eat them or consume them just by having water run through their gills, but smaller fish will actually hunt them. your favorite feeder shrimp, crabs and other crustaceans will eat them. A healthy population will provide a plethora of nutrition including protein, HUFA (highly unsaturated fatty acids) , lipids, and amino acids. This nutrition will be passed on to Clams, Soft corals, LPS, SPS and NPS corals. The amount of nutrition and the profile are largely dependent upon what the rotifers have been cultured in, or what is being provided to the tank. Phytoplankton strains like Isochrysis, Pavlova, Rhodomonas Lens and the diatoms like Thalassiosira weissflogii, Chaetoceros and other brown strains are very high in HUFA providing energy to everything that consumes it. Rotifers are so small that SPS corals easily consume them. from all that I have seen read or been told, I have not found anything to lead me to believe there is a negative to adding rotifers to a reef tank, with the possible exception of bottoming nutrients as they systematically clean your reef while feeding it at the same time.

We culture Brachionus plicatilis (L-type) which is the most suitable for a reef tank and we use our 10 strain Phyto Buffet to provide them with the most complete nutritional profile available. Please share your experiences with rotifers in the reef tank.

 

[ZzyzxRiver]

I’m excited to get my buffet tomorrow- developed a cyano problem in the last couple days, hopefully the rotifers eat it. Please post a link here when you post your cyano thread in a few days!