Infusoria

Infusoria are microscopic aquatic creatures that occurs plenty in stagnant ponds. These are usually cultured to feed aquatic creatures like Neon Tetras, Gouramis and Betta and various invertebrates. These animals cannot eat larger food and hence infusoria helps them to survive during their initial days.

Infusoria are the infusions that are kept uncovered in air for a considerable time. When sufficient quantity of infusoria is not available in average aquarium tank, it is required to prepare an infusoria culture to feed the freshly hatched fish.

Earlier, infusoria term was used for microscopic aquatic creatures like ciliates, euglenoids, protozoa, and unicellular alga.e. Nowadays, in formal the microorganisms formerly included in the infusoria are assigned to the Kingdom Protista.

How to prepare infusoria culture:

There are no hard and fast rules to prepare infusoria culture. You can easily start and maintain your own infusoria culture by following simple methods. For this, you require equipments like a microscope, white lab coat, canning jars, aquarium or old pond water. Follow the given below steps:

• Take jars and use aquarium, vase or pond water to fill it with the old water from that.
• To prepare infusoria culture, never use tap water as chemical and alum in it can kill infusoria.
• Create an infusion by feeding bacteria like rotifers to eat or simply utilize various combinations as per your imagination.
• You can also make use of boil hay or grass in water and apply it as cooled tea.
• As soon as you finish adding of cooled infusion to each jar, allow the jars to rest for few days.
• Always make it a point not to put this mixture in sun; but maintain enough warmness to ensure fast growth of the infusoria culture.
• Allow a flashlight into each jar and search for hazy water. You can see the dust sized infusoria particles in the jars.
• From the culture created in jars, pick the finest culture and flush the others.
• Repeat the whole process to create new cultures and immunize it with the successful culture.
• You can maintain the cultures by using infusion water, powdered eggs or brewer's yeast to feed the bacteria for better infusoria culture.
• Transfer the maximum infusoria cultures into your fish tank and add more water to start over the infusoria culture again.

The whole culture of infusoria is an interesting process to watch under a microscope. You can see lots of microorganisms like paramecium and amoeba at the bottom of the jars through magnifying glass. As these microscopic organisms are attracted to light, you can shine light rays from above. Then drain off the top layer to feed the rest of the culture to the aquarium animals. Change the water after a couple of days.

At times, lettuce leaves, bogwood on plant leaves or Java moss can be added to the aquarium or tank to raise fish fry. ‘Apple snails’ and ‘Colombian ramshorn snails’ that consume unusual quantity of plants secret digested waste product can be used for infusoria.

Boil a handful of hay in a pan of water and after it has cooled pour the water through a sieve and throws away the hay. This is all you need to do though you will have better results if you add an equal quantity of pond water. After a few days you ought to find the water teeming with life, which is so interesting that it is worth examining under a microscope. One of the fascinating things about infusorians is that many of the organisms inhabit quite separate parts of the container, so for example Paramecium can be found at the surface and Amoeba lives on the bottom. Two or three drops of the water contain a whole enthralling world of little animals.