HATCHING SHELLED BRINE SHRIMP EGGS
HATCHING:
Mix sea salt to 1.017 – 1.025 specific gravity.
Add ¼ teaspoon of eggs to 1 liter saltwater
Aerate under moderate air flow for 24-36 hours. Depending on temperature.
Provide Light (fluorescent is sufficient), or place by window.
Achieve slightly faster hatch rates from brine shrimp eggs at higher temps at or near 82 deg F.
Tips:
#1: Use an inverted 2 liter plastic coke bottle. Cut the bottom off. Stick your airline down to the bottom of the inverted bottle. (air stone not necessary )It helps if you have a rigid plastic tube connected to your air line, to keep line all the way to the bottom so eggs don’t gather and accumulate in a pile on the bottom. It’s important to keep eggs circulating while incubating.
#2: Approximately ½ cup of aquarium sea salt per gallon of pure water, or de-chlorinated tap water will set your incubation medium at or near natural seawater salinity, or specific gravity.
#3: Harvesting brine shrimp nauplii: Remove air stone and let culture settle for 10 minutes. Egg shells will float to top. Baby shrimp will hover around if they detect light coming in from side of container, or they will settle on bottom. Take turkey baster and suck out nauplii babies. Squirt in sieve, 120 micron mesh. (Note: We sell nice affordable pro sieves in our store.) Rinse and feed to livestock. Always rinse. Not a good practice to add culture water to your pristine aquarium. Incubating a culture is an ideal environment for bacteria. They grow faster than the animal you are hatching.
#4: For those of you that would like to get more out of your brine shrimp eggs culturing endeavor, grow the baby shrimp out for a few days. They will last up to 4 days in the original hatching container. Just start feeding them a few drops of our Roti-Food that you can get from our store. Start feeding around 6- 8 hours after hatching. Just put in a few drops of food, enough to keep the water cloudy. This is a good rule of thumb, because you can’t have exact instructions at this point. Different situations will have more baby shrimp consuming food faster etc… Just figure out what’s best for you under these guidelines. At this point, after 3 - 4 days they will be 3 times larger and more nutritious for your fish and corals.
If you want to grow brine shrimp even larger just keep repeating above process and remove babies. Squirt into sieve and put them in new oxygenated saltwater every 3 – 4 days. The larger brine shrimp get the more nutritious they are as food.