I’m feeling very excited about aquaria at the moment, because I’m getting into setting up the aquarium for my animal aggregate experiment. I’ve also been thinking about getting my own aquarium at home, because the more I learn about this stuff, the more I think I would enjoy having my own personal fish school in my house, that I can stare at and think about while I’m trying to inspire myself to write my thesis. But now, things are getting even more exciting. It all started because it looks like I may be doing some work with water fleas, which are actually a species (Daphnia) of very small crustaceans (up to 5mm in size). They also swarm, and it’s easier to look after them and house them and get ethical approval to shine lights at them than it is to do the same for fish.
“So what?”, you might ask. The ‘so what’ is that I’ve started doing some research on water fleas, because I need to know how to raise them and take care of them and now I’m getting excited. Daphnia can usually be bought in pet stores, because they are food for fish. In the process of searching for information about this, I came across this page on how to raise daphnia to feed your fish by also raising a tank with algea in it, which you feed to the Daphnia, which you then feed to your fish. And what sort of fish? In a very happy making turn of events, it turns out that Giant Danios- the schooling fish I was planning to study- happen to eat daphnia.
At which point, upon learning this, my head happily exploded. Can you say
ECOSYSTEM! So now I’m
reading about aquatic
plants. Joy! I can’t wait!
posted at 13:17 on Mon, 04 Dec, 2006 |
path: /school
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