Copepod Diet
Copepod food. What do Copepods eat?
Copepods feed directly on phytoplankton such as our blend of 6 types called Phytopreme Live, catching cells singly. Some of the larger species are predators of their smaller relatives. Many benthic copepods eat organic detritus or the bacteria that grow in it, and their mouth parts are adapted for scraping and biting. Herbivorous copepods, particularly those in rich, cold seas, store up energy from their food as oil droplets while they feed in the spring and summer on plankton blooms. These droplets may take up over half of the volume of their bodies in polar species.
Copepod (subclass Copepoda), any member of the widely distributed crustacean subclass Copepoda. Copepods are of great ecological importance, providing food for many species of fish Most of the 13,000 known species are free-living marine forms, occurring throughout the world’s oceans. Copepods are key components of marine food chains and serve either directly or indirectly as food sources for most commercially important fish species.
It’s important when considering introducing live copepods to the aquarium to have a dependable proven copepod food such as “Phytopreme Live” 6 types of phytoplankton so you can dose your tank regularly to maintain the copepods at their maximum reproduction rates. Phytopreme provides the optimum nutritional levels for the pods in your reef tank.
The copepods are the largest and most diversified group of crustaceans. At present they include over 24.000 species, 2.400 genera and 210 families, a surely underestimated number, inhabiting sea and continental waters, semi terrestrial habitats, etc.
They are considered the most plentiful multicellular group on the earth, outnumbering even the insects, which include more species, but fewer individuals! Particularly, the copepods are the dominant forms of the marine plankton and constitute the secondary producers in the marine environments and a fundamental step in the trophodinamics of the oceans.
During their long evolutionary history, starting in the Lower Cretaceous, copepods spread over all the continents, as well as they successfully colonized about all the available water habitats of the Planet, becoming well adapted or specialized to very different salinity regimes, from marine and hypersaline waters to continental freshwater bodies, and to a wide range of temperature from the polar to the hot springs waters.
Copepods regularly live also in marine and freshwater sediments, in different groundwater substrates, in continental and anchialine caves (limestone caves), cenotes, ephemeral water bodies, bromeliads, marshes, wet campos, and on plants as well. Moreover free-living cyclopoid and harpacticoid copepods may form an important component of cryptozoic fauna in moist forest litter. Coastal, estuarine brackish waters harbor many copepod genera and species which can persist in these unfavorable habitats mainly as resting, diapausing eggs.
Copepods can be found also in strange cryptic habitats, such as the small pools between the leaves of some tropical plants, crab burrows, tree holes and even discarded car tires. Copepods, as many other aquatic organisms, can be easily transported, either actively or passively, often as resistant stages.
Some fish that benefit from eating live copepods are:
Mandarin, Dragonets, Gobies, Angelfish, Chromis, Anthias, Clownfish, Seahorse Fry.
Britanica
(Sars, 1901; Van de Velde 1984; Matsumura-Tundisi et al. 1990; Saunders et al., 1993; Reid & Reed 1994).
(Reid, 1986, 2001; Fiers & Ghenne, 2000).