While feeding phytoplankton helps them breed, and will keep your population high, you need to have enough of them in the first place for them to breed. Many people who cycle their tanks using traditional methods (fishless 4-6 weeks), will experience large pod populations due to lack of predation. The sooner you add the fish, the smaller your breeding population is going to be. People also have a tendency of buying fish that eat only or mostly pods, and continue to buy them and feed frozen foods until the population depletes. Only then do you know that they required the nutrition of the pods to survive, and they start having problems with these fish. The diet of fish is commonly misunderstood, if they eat 99% zooplankton in the wild, they aren't suddenly going to be able to get all their nutrition from frozen food alternatives. If their natural food is in the aquarium, they will primarily eat that until it depletes. This means that even if your Wrasses, Gobies, Anthias, Clowns ect are eating frozen foods, they will still be primarily preying on the copepod population until it depletes. This leaves you with two options, either boost their natural food source, or feed processed alternatives multiple times a day and try to convert them from their typical diets. Some fish are particularly difficult to change diet, either because they require constant feeding through the day, because their mouths are too small for most foods, or because they are too slow to compete for foods during feeding.
The more you start with, the more you end up with. If the majority of the contents of your tank were transferred from a well-seeded tank, then your tank will start with a large population. The more dry materials went into the tank, the less you will have to start with.
). Several pieces of LR came from established systems, and I'm skimming pretty dry right now. I'm just curious what else I can do to get some amiphipods and Copepods going in there.
