Saltwater Aquarium Blog

Phytoplankton Equipment Set-up

This post will cover the instructions for setting up the equipment for your phytoplankton culture station:

1) Mount the fluorescent light horizontally on a wall about table-height
2) Slide the table up against the wall, just under the light
3) Spread your culture bottles out to maximize surface area exposed to the light
4) Cut 3 lengths of 12 inch rigid tubing and 4 lengths of flexible tubing, 3 long enough to reach from the bottles to the splitter and 1 long enough to run from the air pump to the splitter
5) Attach flexible tubing to splitter, pump and rigid tubing
6) Insert rigid tubing into culture bottle
7) Turn on air pump
8 ) Fill bottles with a small amount of freshwater to test and make sure all 3 airlines create a modest flow of bubbles. Adjust flow rate on splitter as necessary to create uniform moderate flow

This is what my phytoplankton culture set-up looks like:

Phytoplankton Set-up