[cjstl]

OK, I need some help. I had a planted bowl with MGOPM that turned brown. I have removed almost all of the plants to other tanks. The bowl has been sitting in relative darkness on my kitchen counter for several weeks. There's nothing in it now but a few stems of hornwort and najas, a little moss, some snails, and thousands and thousands of daphnia. If you peer through the murk, it literally looks like the water is moving from all of the black specs. I can't believe they've survived this long without the light growing more algae, and it makes me wonder if they're eating something in the MG?

Anyhow, I've been promising and promising my wife that I will get rid of that "hideous eyesore". I have to do something with it, but I don't want to waste all of that live food. I've considered just dropping some endler fry in there and letting them go to town for a few days, but I'd really like to keep a living colony in another jar or vase somewhere. But I definitely don't want to move that nasty water along with them.

I've thought about using the little white net to scoop out as many as I can, but that sounds like it would get impractical pretty quickly. Another thought was to use a turkey baster to extract a little water at a time and squirt it into a coffee filter or something similar. But again, how do I get them out of there? Has anyone tried to do something like this before?

 

[Method]

Daphnia, like many algae eating microinverts, will swim towards a light source. If it was me I'd turn off all the room lights, shine a bright light over the bowl, and scoop them out with a white net.

You won't get them all, but you'll get a lot.

Feel free to send me some!

 

[PlantedRich]

Another way to go depending on what you want to feed them to and how large the tank? When I feed things like this, I do the light with an LED flashlight, suck some up with a battery filler and just squirt it in the bigger tank. While it does move some pollution, the amount is so small that it doesn't effect the larger tank. Just a tiny bit more for the filtering bacteria?