A Norwegian Aquaculture company has brought to market a very interesting product that could be the next revolution in the ornamental fish breeding industry.
Until now, prey culture has always been the bottleneck of marine fish aquaculture. But C-Feed has managed to produce copepods eggs, from the species Arcatia tonsa, kept in a dormant stage, and apparently in a clay case. The copepod eggs can be cold-stored at a hatchery until they are needed as food.
The eggs are then placed in seawater and within 24 hours, the fish farmer has a tank filled with vital 100-micrometers-in-length copepod nauplii ready to be fed to fish larvae. In some commercial fish hatcheries, this technology has already eliminated the need for lower nutritional value rotifer cultures.
Their product C-podz is quite a revolution in the aquaculture world. Each bottle of C-podz contains millions of high-quality farmed copepod eggs, that are ready and easy to use.
Larval prey production is one of the biggest investments in breeding marine fish. Being able to use third-party Phytoplankton, ready-to-hatch copepods and artemia eggs could be a real game changer. So now you just need to collect eggs and have a small hatchery at your disposal. It removes the need for major prey culture rooms that are critical to fish larvae. We could probably even imagine people breeding fish in their garages as they do for corals.
This product is such a revolution that the company is currently out of stock, and working on increasing production to supply the enormous demand.
