TacticalDumb***
Community Member
This is only a hypothetical and should be treated as a thought experiment. With that in mind I was looking into lancelets as I find them fascinating and found some papers on Amphioxus (lancelet) husbandry with one of them having long term success and the other not going into success rates still contains useful information. Looking into the paper where they had long term success they were kind enough to share their protocols (see attached file) and looking through them there were a few thing that stuck out to me.
1. Lancelets seem to be vulnerable to bacterial infection with that being the biggest cause of death in captivity.
2. They need to clean the sand every 3 weeks by removing the lancelets from the sand and rinsing with seawater until the water ran clean.
3. The lancelets need a special diet.
4. water parameters don't seem to be special.
Starting with observation 1 we can solve that problem with a quarantine which they also put in their protocols (see attached). From what I've read (assuming I understood correctly) once they removed the infection from the lancelets it didn't really come back and if it did you would just re-quarantine them.
With observation 2 I'm not 100% sure how it should be solve. It seems like they need clean sand. From what I've read from other sources it seems the lancelets don't have a proper way of disposing their waste. Apparently they just live and excrete waste in the same burrow. So as long as the sand bed is clean we probably won't have to worry about this. From my time looking into this it seems it would be best to have at least 1 sea cucumber to sift through the sand bed. They're native to the same environment as the Florida lancelet and they're supposedly really good at cleaning detritus from sand.
The special diet is diet C if you're looking at the online paper but for those who don't want to read the paper or the protocols the diet is the following: 150ml of algae (3:1 green algae: red algae), 2.5 ml of Rotirich, 2.5 ml of Planktomarin, 0,5 ml of liquifry, 0.5 ml of Nutrimarin and that's all blended together then strained through a 200 micron mesh. It's probably worth noting that this per 5 liter (1.3 gallons) (I am quoting their measurements btw) tank, with 25-30 lancelets per tank, that are hooked up to a 700 liter (roughly 185 gallon) circuit. so make what you will of that. I should also note that they don't mention specific feeding method other than add into each tank or add into the upper distribution tank and turning of the UV filters and doing one or the other daily.
So with that in mind if we set up a tank around the we would want the water to be at 1.026 if we're keeping the Florida lancelets and the temp at your standard reef tank temps between 74°f to 80°f. we would need an extensive quarantine procedure and watch them for diseases. We would need a CUC that can really keep the sand clean and be compatible with the lancelet. Probably sea cucumbers, nassarius snails, conchs and sand sifting starfish might work. I'm not sure about sand sifting gobies and crabs will probably be a no. Speaking of sand they noted that they had the best results with gulf sand so we should probably use the same and I would imagine we would want the sand bed to be around 3 in deep so they can burrow. For feeding we will use the slurry mentioned previously and it would probably be beneficial to add copepods as they don't seem to discriminate when filter feeding. With this kind of slurry what kind of coral do you think should be kept? NPS? SPS? Or do you think LPS and softies would be okay? Also what kind of filtration do you think would be needed? In the paper they mention use of a protein skimmer and a UV filter, so that's probably a good start. How would you do the daily feeding? would you dose over the course of the day or add it all at once? Would spot feeding be necessary?
This is a thought experiment so let me know what you think. It's 1 am and I have to get up at 6:30 for college so I probably won't be responding for a bit but I'm interested to see what you think.
1. Lancelets seem to be vulnerable to bacterial infection with that being the biggest cause of death in captivity.
2. They need to clean the sand every 3 weeks by removing the lancelets from the sand and rinsing with seawater until the water ran clean.
3. The lancelets need a special diet.
4. water parameters don't seem to be special.
Starting with observation 1 we can solve that problem with a quarantine which they also put in their protocols (see attached). From what I've read (assuming I understood correctly) once they removed the infection from the lancelets it didn't really come back and if it did you would just re-quarantine them.
With observation 2 I'm not 100% sure how it should be solve. It seems like they need clean sand. From what I've read from other sources it seems the lancelets don't have a proper way of disposing their waste. Apparently they just live and excrete waste in the same burrow. So as long as the sand bed is clean we probably won't have to worry about this. From my time looking into this it seems it would be best to have at least 1 sea cucumber to sift through the sand bed. They're native to the same environment as the Florida lancelet and they're supposedly really good at cleaning detritus from sand.
The special diet is diet C if you're looking at the online paper but for those who don't want to read the paper or the protocols the diet is the following: 150ml of algae (3:1 green algae: red algae), 2.5 ml of Rotirich, 2.5 ml of Planktomarin, 0,5 ml of liquifry, 0.5 ml of Nutrimarin and that's all blended together then strained through a 200 micron mesh. It's probably worth noting that this per 5 liter (1.3 gallons) (I am quoting their measurements btw) tank, with 25-30 lancelets per tank, that are hooked up to a 700 liter (roughly 185 gallon) circuit. so make what you will of that. I should also note that they don't mention specific feeding method other than add into each tank or add into the upper distribution tank and turning of the UV filters and doing one or the other daily.
So with that in mind if we set up a tank around the we would want the water to be at 1.026 if we're keeping the Florida lancelets and the temp at your standard reef tank temps between 74°f to 80°f. we would need an extensive quarantine procedure and watch them for diseases. We would need a CUC that can really keep the sand clean and be compatible with the lancelet. Probably sea cucumbers, nassarius snails, conchs and sand sifting starfish might work. I'm not sure about sand sifting gobies and crabs will probably be a no. Speaking of sand they noted that they had the best results with gulf sand so we should probably use the same and I would imagine we would want the sand bed to be around 3 in deep so they can burrow. For feeding we will use the slurry mentioned previously and it would probably be beneficial to add copepods as they don't seem to discriminate when filter feeding. With this kind of slurry what kind of coral do you think should be kept? NPS? SPS? Or do you think LPS and softies would be okay? Also what kind of filtration do you think would be needed? In the paper they mention use of a protein skimmer and a UV filter, so that's probably a good start. How would you do the daily feeding? would you dose over the course of the day or add it all at once? Would spot feeding be necessary?
This is a thought experiment so let me know what you think. It's 1 am and I have to get up at 6:30 for college so I probably won't be responding for a bit but I'm interested to see what you think.
