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Infusoria


Infusoria is a collection of very small aquatic organisms including paramecia that provide a good start for newly hatched tadpoles & Caudate larvae of some smaller species. Infusoria are present in most aquariums but not normally in a high enough qty. to be of use so at times it can be necessary to culture infusoria to give your tads a kick start in life.
There are many ways of making an infusoria culture, here's one method.



Put some old dry lettuce leaves in a glass jar and add boiling water, leave to cool and allow it to stew for a couple of days:


Strain the liquid and throw away the lettuce leaves, you should be left with a very cloudy water:


Take some water from a pond or well established aquarium, draw the water from the ponds edge where there is normally a higher concentration of infusoria (you should be able to see some of the larger organisms in the collected water) and add it to your lettuce water:


Make a hole in the centre of the lid and screw it on, place your culture in a fairly sunny position at room temperature:


After about a week you should notice an increase in the larger sized organisms and the water should be clearing, at this point you can start to harvest your culture using a pipette, you can also now use your culture to seed a new one.

A lot of tadpoles & Caudate larvae do not require infusoria to get them started but it’s handy to know how to do it anyway.