Batophora occidentalis

[Mustafa]

Recently I was lucky enough to take over a 2.5 gallon tank with this algae species from Jason who is a member of this forum. Thanks Jason! It's the same tank as described and depicted in this old thread:

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=5360&hilit=batophora+oerstedii

I'm going to share my experiences and progress with this tank and the species. I'm going to try to reproduce the species both in its original tank and also distribute it in various other tanks with different conditions to see how well it does. I'm not going to offer it for sale before it has been established that this species is actually as tolerant to various conditions (salinity, temperature, light etc.) as the Supershrimp, snails and other plants offered on Petshrimp.com.

The literature says that Batophora occidentalis is a tropical species living in mostly marine environments in shallow water which doesn't sound too adaptable, but we'll see. I'll get to the bottom of this. Here are a few pictures...I'll post pictures every few days although the next few were taken every day just to record some initial progress.

Received the tank on 4.16.2017 (Sunday) half filled with water so it could be transported more easily. I prepared my brackish mix and filled the rest of the tank. I also put 40 Supershrimp in there so they can both provide nutrients for the plants and also eat all the nuisance algae and organic matter that had been accumulating in this tank( the tank had been without shrimp for a long time apparently). Here are pictures from the next day. Still lots of nuisance algae visible:

4.17.2017

[Mustafa]

And the day after:

4.18.2017

[Mustafa]

4.19.2017:

[Mustafa]

4.20.2017:

[Mustafa]

4.21.2017

Now they have an LED light on top. Also..in the 5th picture you can see some spores. There are quite a few of those throughout the tank.

[Arquisto]

Oh man this would be great once you can really test that it's as tolerant as the shrimp, snails, and Macroalgae.

Thanks for keeping us posted. And thank you Jason for sending the tank to Mustafa!

[Mustafa]

Oh man this would be great once you can really test that it's as tolerant as the shrimp, snails, and Macroalgae.

Thanks for keeping us posted. And thank you Jason for sending the tank to Mustafa!

Yeah, definitely a promising species. But it'll take a while to do all the testing and propagating. I just don't like offering plants or animals to people on the suspicion that they may do well. Took me a while before I finally offered the supershrimp mossballs to the public too. But the wait was worth it...awesome plant!

[JennyPenny]

If you need volunteers to help with testing, I am all over that! This plant is really cool!

[Mustafa]

If you need volunteers to help with testing, I am all over that! This plant is really cool!

Thanks for the offer, but I have 70 plus "volunteer tanks" ready to take the job right here already. The problem though is that I don't have enough of this plant to distribute yet, so I'll have to wait until this little tank produces more and then transfer some of the plants into much larger tanks for higher production.

[Mustafa]

Alright folks...after some research I have identified this species as Batophora occidentalis instead of B. oerstedi. I have changed all the references to B. oerstedi to B. occidentalis in this thread. Used this paper for identification:

"Vegetative and Reproductive Characteristics of Two Species of Batophora (Chlorophyta, Dasycladaceae) from Chetumal Bay, Quintana Roo, Mexico"

by J. M. GÕmez-Poot, J. Espinoza-Avalos* and S. G. Jimnez-Flores

Abstract and full text:

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... Roo_Mexico

[Arquisto]

Do you worry how it'll fare in tanks with the super mossball and the super macroalgae? It looks like it's a pretty fast grower and may out compete them for nutrients.

[Super Jess]

Sort of off topic, but those IKEA jars you have in the background are great! I've got one going for my shrimp, too

Can't wait to see how your experiment turns out. These plants look cool.

[Mustafa]

Sort of off topic, but those IKEA jars you have in the background are great! I've got one going for my shrimp, too

Can't wait to see how your experiment turns out. These plants look cool.

IKEA sells those too? Hmmm....mine are actually imported from Europe and supposedly hand made out of one piece of high quality glass (there is no seam). I was going to offer them online soon. They're great.

[Mustafa]

Do you worry how it'll fare in tanks with the super mossball and the super macroalgae? It looks like it's a pretty fast grower and may out compete them for nutrients.

My experience so far is that it doesn't grow any faster than the Supershrimp macroalgae, so not worried so far.

[Mustafa]

Also...a little slightly disappointing update. I transferred a rock with this plant into one of my breeding tanks with thousands of shrimp. It's been a few weeks and it looks like the plants are mostly gone. I'm not sure yet if the plants disintegrated got eaten or of the shrimp actually actively ate/killed the plants. The original tank with the plants only has 40 shrimp and tons (100s ?) of plants. Obviously 40 shrimp don't do much damage in such a tank. But if you have 1000s of shrimp and only 10 or so plants, then things may look different.

I'll have to experiment a bit more to have a conclusive answer to this. This species of plant is definitely much finer/softer than either the Supershrimp macroalgae or the mossballs, so it's naturally more likely to be eaten by 1000s of hungry shrimp. Even if it turns out that the shrimp actively eat this plant when super hungry, I don't think that will be a problem in the typical hobbyist tank as there will always be more than enough surface algae growing for the relatively small number of shrimp.