I am looking for a fairly easy method such as lower/raise pH or salinity. Any experiences ?
I know that solation of T. suecica cells is one method but this will take too long before a new clean culture is up and running.
Rotifers are very resistant so it is difficult to kill them without killing everything.
Your culture could be filtrated through a 20μm mesh size in order to remove rotifers and ciliates, if they are bigger than 20µm. T. suecica measure around 15µm.
Then the filtrate can be incubated in a new tank or in the old one carrefully bleached.
Frédéric Azémar is right. Look up Nitex nylon mesh. Check to make sure the ciliates don't 'squeeze' through. Depending on the species, they can go though holes smaller than normal appearance.
Did you have luck, Christina?
Tetraselmis could be of very similar size to 20 /um. For rotifers, even 30-40/um may help if you pass the culture to new medium frequently. But for ciliates.... Even 10/um mesh does not provide you a security if, e.g., scuticociliates appear. As well, try to pass the culture frequently, maybe the ciliates are not growing so fast.
Which ciliate? If they are bacterivorous, addition of antibiotics (one time) could help (streptomycin+penicilin) but be careful, bacteria can be a source of vitamins for your culture. You can pass the culture from "clean"-antibiotics containing culture to your already used medium (used with Tetraselmis) filtered through 2/um membrane (to provide "probiotics", i.e. living bacteria)
Good luck
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