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Copepod and phytoplankton culture starter pack with live copepods and feed

Copepod Culture Starter Pack

A$60.00 AUD
Live Copepods (Species)
Copepods (Quantity)
Phytoplankton (Quantity)
  • Live cultures leave us on Mondays and Tuesdays only, so nothing sits in a depot over the weekend.
  • Order once Tuesday's run has gone (11:00pm AEST) and yours travels on the following Monday or Tuesday.
  • Best Bottle Guarantee: you get the best bottle available commercially, or your money back.
  • DOA Money Back Guarantee. If it turns up dead, send us a short video and we refund it.
  • Purchasing in Tasmania? You MUST provide the appropriate permit(s) for us to ship live foods with your order, otherwise any live foods in your order will be refunded and the remaining items shipped without them.
Shipping policyRefund policy

Live copepods, done properly

Our pocket friendly “Reef Rations” combo packs are designed to help you establish a healthy, self-sustaining copepod population in your marine system.

This combo includes live copepods paired with freshly cultured phytoplankton, their primary food source. Together, they create a stable food chain for your reef, feeding finicky fish and helping control nuisance algae. Ideal for seeding refugiums, boosting biodiversity, or simply giving your tank a nutritious edge.

Which one do I want

Five species, side by side

They are not interchangeable. Size decides which fish can physically eat them, and habit decides where they end up living once they are in the tank. Pick on those two things before anything else.

  1. 0.5 to 0.75 mm

    Tisbe

    Benthic

  2. 0.6 to 0.8 mm

    Dioithona

    Planktonic

  3. 0.6 to 1.0 mm

    Apocyclops

    Planktonic

  4. 0.8 to 1.5 mm

    Tigriopus

    Benthic

  5. 1.0 to 1.5 mm

    Calenoid

    Planktonic

Benthic species stay on the rock and glass, so they breed in the tank and keep producing. Planktonic species swim in the water column, which is what a mandarin or a wrasse actually hunts. Most tanks do best with one of each.

What they actually do

Why a reef wants copepods in it

They are not just fish food. A tank with a working pod population feeds itself between your feeds, and that is the difference between keeping fish alive and watching them thrive.

  • Food that is already alive

    Live prey moves, and movement is what triggers a fish to hunt. It is the difference between a mandarin picking at the rock all day and one that actually eats.

  • Better colour and condition

    Copepods carry the fatty acids that frozen and dry food lose in processing. Fish fed on live pods hold their colour and put weight back on.

  • They clean up after you

    Pods graze detritus, film algae and the food your fish missed, so less of it breaks down into nitrate and phosphate.

  • A food web, not a feeding schedule

    Once a population establishes it keeps producing on its own. The tank stops depending entirely on what you put in it each day.

  • Corals feed on them too

    Nauplii, the larval stage, are small enough for LPS and many softies to catch. You see it as better polyp extension.

  • Almost nothing to maintain

    Seed the tank, keep some phyto going in, and leave them to it. A refugium or a bit of rubble rock is all the help they need.

Feed them, or grow your own

Goes well with