While Reed Mariculture helped make home rotifer culture a mainstream prospect, their new division, APBreed, has brought additional focus to the pitfalls of small scale rotifer culture. Their latest introduction, the APBreed Compact Culture System™ (CCS) was introduced to bring stability, consistency, and high production, to the home and small institutional culturist. Too many people seem to crash their rotifers; the CCS, with proper usage, should change that for good.
At first glance, the complete CCS Starter Kit appears to be simply a 5 gallon bucket with a lid, but you couldn’t be more short-sighted with that observation. First and foremost, everything about the CCS is FDA approved, food-grade, which means that rotifers produced with the CCS are viable feeds in foodfish aquaculture. That small detail doesn’t necessarily come cheap, but it adds a level of comfort to the quality of what you’re culturing rotifers in. At the core of the CCS is a custom designed rotifer culture filter. It’s absolutely not a sponge filter, but appears to be a combination of rotifer floss with upwelling flow. The CSS filter (also sold without a the FDA approved bucket and lid if you want to use your own) comes with special mounting hardware to secure it centrally in the bucket. This filtration system, when combined with a daily maintenance regiment, is said to create significantly higher rotifer culture densities than a typical hobbyist setup (a 5 gallon bucket with an airstone).
To run the CCS, you’ll need an air pump and saltwater. A heater may be necessary if you’re situating your culture in some unusually cool location. You’ll of course need a starter culture for your rotifers, and you’ll need something to feed them. While I personally use Reed Mariculture’s RotiGrow Plus for daily rotifer feeding, the APBreed line of products includes RGComplete, a refrigerated liquid form of phytoplankton which could perhaps be described as a further enhanced, further idiot-proofed, version of my trusted RotiGrow Plus. The CCS was designed implicitly for use with RGComplete as part of a daily routine (hopefully fool-proof) culture methodology.
While we’re sure some DIY guys will look at the CCS and say “I can make that”, the big question is “what’s your time and effort worth?” Arguably, when it’s all said and done, the convenience of having the CSS shipped to your door and ready to go, probably outweighs the time, effort and headaches of trying to mimic it yourself. And that’s really what it’s all about – an elegantly simple, well-designed system created and tested by APBreed. So what is the maintenance regime? How is the CCS in practice? We’re about to find out, so watch in a few weeks or months for the verdict!
Unboxing the APBreed CCS
What does the CCS look like upon arrival? Here’s a look at one of the first CCS shipped by APBreed.
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