Tisbe Biminiensis! Best All-Round Copepod for Aquariums?

hi tras pin here I'm back at the top shelf Aquatics Farm I'm in our office and today I wanted to do a little Spotlight into one of the most important species that has really done a lot for me in my aquaculture career uh right when I got out of my undergraduate at the University of Rhode Island uh my first gig was basically growing brine shrimp and C pods for the reap aquarum industry over in uh Rhode Island there so one of the species I really got a chance to research and got to know a lot about is the tiby benam mienis now whenever I'm at a trade show or even when people grab me when I'm restocking the pods in the retail store or whenever people just grab me for a question they often ask what is the best pod what's the best cook pod if I only you know there's all these species all these names APO Cyclops tigriopus par colus pseudo di Optimus pelagicus which one do I want now usually the first question I ask is well what is your goal everything in this hobby is goal oriented and for about 90% of people I'd comfortably say their goal is well I just want to get my right my reef tank either started on the right foot I'm starting a new reef tank or I'm restarting a reef tank or I have a reef that I just did a treatment on you know so it's it wiped out a lot of the invertebrate life so now I want to make sure that those Copa pods are coming back in but when it comes to that application of Copa pods actually living breathing functioning uh in the reef aquarium itself I do recommend out of all the many species that are commercially available in the the hobby today um tiby benam Enis would be my go-to recommendation when it comes to the best pod for that specific application the application of being uh a functional member of the reef tank as a whole along with all the beneficial caveats that come with that so when we're trying to evaluate Tanis and why I consider it the best for this General Reef application let's try and kind of quantify what we really want out of cop pods when it comes to the requium industry let's say in the context of an individual tank sitting on a desk or even the greater requium industry functioning at large and really all those groups be a commercial Fish Hatchery all the way down to the average Reef aquarist really want to have three main beneficial criteria when it comes to selecting and identifying what cop pods have value and in some of these categories T bensis is a little bit behind some other of the more selective po pod species but in some categories specifically when it comes to its role living in the average reef tank it greatly supersedes many of the other uh species commercially available at the time so let's talk about those three General criteria well the first is what I call suitability as a general Reef feed so you have a cop pod it's living inside the tank it's going to get eaten by something let's say like a mandarin Dragonette or a possum Rass what are some general things no matter what's eating that c pod be it a coral a worm a Rass what are some general things that we all want out of that cop pod well we want them to be relatively soft bodied we want them to actually be digestible we don't want them to be like other some species of cop pods which have very sharp thorny projections that actually can damage fish when they're trying to consume them or damage the intestines of fish when they're consumed in excess amounts we don't want cop pods which can produce or concentrate toxins uh that can act defensive response we also want a cop pod that we're dosing into a tank or using his feed to have generally good nutritional requirements they don't necessarily aren't born and endowed with the best nutritional profile when compared to something like that super Ferrari Elite paranis but what they do have is the ability to take all these inferior materials dtis bacteria cyanobacteria dead algae cells uneaten feed and all these Organics that otherwise would be attack a on the reef aquarium or could produce higher levels of nitrates or phosphates or or produce all kinds of other bad uh elements if they're just left to decompose the tisby C pod is able to take in all that inferior forage and scientists are finding that it actually has bacteria in its gut that make enzymes that allow it to take things like inferior fatty acids and actually can elongate and desaturate them so it can take basically kind of refuse and garbage and can turn it back into a relatively much higher value uh cop pod uh tissue generally speaking the nutritional profile of a tisby cop pod when it is consumed by a coral or a mandarin dragonet that tisb coke pod is not only just a package of all the fats and carbohydrates and proteins that it's been able to consume through all the things that it's been Scavenging on but it is in fact a giant living bioactive pillow of all those fats lipids carbohydrates complete with living bacteria probiotics pro-enzymes and bioactive well fiber essentially in the kiten that is the shell of the tisby so generally speaking with that first main category of what is it as a good refeed tisby checks all the major boxes now when it comes to these specific characteristics they can kind of be refined and are a lot more cut and dry when it comes to our second category which is application of cop pods in aquaculture this pertains a lot less to let's say the D today operations of a reef tank that we have here and more so the greater existential Realm of the reef aquarium industry as a whole um it has like many other cop pods a laral state called aulus it's a nus that really makes a cop pod species uh really really valuable or maybe not so much when it comes to breeding invertebrates and very very fragile laral fish things like tangs if these laral fish cannot consume the baby nus Cod because because it's too big well then that species has minimal value in that specific realm of really intense Frontier aquaculture and that's frankly where tisby suffers the first major efforts to use tisby were actually bringing them Northern species like tisby huran to try and uh conduct hbit and cod o culture over in Norway and Denmark and the long-term conclusion of that was that tis nuses are simply a little bit too big to help us break through and rear a lot of those really sensitive small Marine larae where tisby does have some wonderful applications in the realm of aquaculture is in nurseries especially things like commercial seahorse and Mandarin dragonet production where yes you have all these juvenile fish that need to be foraging constantly and yes you're going to be feeding them like any commercial operation does but it's very important that those fish are constantly surrounded with other forage that they can constantly be grazing on so a lot of seahorse farmers will purposefully raise their baby seahorses in tanks with lots of macro algae and other areas that can have lots of tisby cop pods and the like to really enhance that forage now let's talk about the main Arena that tisby thrives in that third main category when it comes to the value that any particular cop pod species brings to the greater reef aquarium industry and hobby and that in my opinion is the function of a cop pod species to not only be highly nutritious maybe being able to be fed to a marine larae but comes into something else what happens when that copt is not being consumed what is the cop podt doing up into those days hours minutes before it's being actually consumed by a fish Coral or invert and does that activity have value that is where tisby Banis shines and why I consider it basically I think kind of the best of the commonly commercially available cop pod speci ises you see in the hobby today this is because tisby bensis is extremely adaptable in all directions it's Yuri haline it can survive all kinds of salinities going down to almost 1.0 uh5 it can go all the way up to almost 1.035 1.04 if it has the right nutrition um it can take a wide variety of temperatures it doesn't necessarily like getting cold it doesn't refrigerate all that well but tibes can get hot and they can certainly Thrive at that nice Goldilocks average reef tank temperature they can also eat a wide variety of forage they're not like these high end Ferrari parvocalanus cup pods that oh they need to only eat a live t isoc crises algae cell or are just going to die they can switch to anything cyanobacteria thetis there's all kinds of things so depending on which surplus of waste or algae or anything else that a tank is producing the tisby population in that tank can kind of switch over to mainly capitalizing on that available forage versus kind of busting once they've depleted something specific that they're hunting now let's take a quick look at the aquarium behind me what do you see there's two things that scream out to me in the context of copap PODS one is all this surface area this rock work we know it's so important for Bio biological filtration we know it's so important for the nuances and long-term health of our tanks but think of all those pores all those little surface areas they just like any pore get clogged over time the tritis all kinds of even just broken down rock as it turns to powder all these things will eventually be stuck in with webs of bacteria and they will clog and eventually all the surface area of this live rock over time will eventually lose the minute flow which really allows it to communicate with the outside water column and help the refunction as a whole now what if I told you that the tibes especially once they're thriving act as wonderful miners in the reef aquarium the jewels of the reef underground that explore carve through all these pores eat remove scrape and scrub all which is kind of consuming this Inner Space Between spaces and while they're not only reducing the organic load inside those spaces they are increasing water flow and oxygenation to those spaces through the little canals and areas that that they occupy now much like any other cop pod species tibes can only have a certain population before you know they're a little cramped and they want to scatter some cop pod species like parvocalanus and pseudo di Optimus will be like that's it we've hit a certain population everybody stops everybody dies tisb are not so much that they can take extremely high concentrations of individuals touching each other and they won't necessarily shut off reproduction what they will do is scatter they'll scatter and they'll explore they'll explore new areas of live rock they'll get swapped up and and while they do their little sarees into the water column they'll get sucked up into the filtration where they'll colonize the filter socks the the rocks in your refugium the surfaces of macroy and the like so their ability to be extremely plastic and to reproduce rapidly directly benefits the reef aquarium because essentially it's a it's a cleanup crew that operates on a microscopic level and self- propagates and sways es and almost self-regulates itself with the needs and production of waste from the aquarium itself so in conclusion these tisb these tisby Banes these tiny little microscopic Copa pod like lobsters in our tanks why do I consider them perhaps one of the most valuable reef aquarium cul pods that we have today well it's because they have a good nutritional profile they are excellent scavengers they have wonderful um environmental tolerances that allow them to adapt to a wide range of Tanks they are not specific about what they eat and they can take all the end products of an aquarium all that will slowly tax the system over time and kind of bring it towards this natural capping um and it constantly keeps all that bacteria detrius and waste at a reducing level um and replacing it with a surplus of living Cod live feed so I'd like to end this episode on a question how many of you have dose cop pods into your aquarium do you consider that dosing tibes a one time is appropriate or do you consider that continuous dosings has a benefit did you dose cop pods after a chemical treatment did you dose C pods anticipating the arrival of a mandarin dragonet or another zop Plankton uh heavy feeding fish kind of curious to see where your guys' response are have you tried to use tibes in any home culture breeding projects um very curious comment below subscribe feed the algorithm like a a hungry Mandarin dragonet destroying entire Villages at tis cop pods we will see you next time [Music]