rearing brine shrimp

[butwa20]

anyone having luck growing and breeding brine shrimp i have read many ways of doing this but want to know from this group. i have some hatched in a 2l bottle right now. They hatched about 8 hours ago. is this enough to grow and breed or just hatch. and i need to know what is the best readly avail food to use and how much?

[LittleReef]

They are extremely easy to hatch. I do it every day to feed my seahorse fry. A 2L bottle is what I use to hatch them in as well. If you're wanting to use them as food for your other fish, you'll need to enrich them, as brine shrimp lose all nutritional value after 8-12 of life. You can use spirulina to enrich them for 2 x 12 hour periods, which is also known as gut-loading.

I use a powder from seahorsesource.org called Dan's Feed. It is great and enriches up to 50g, so it lasts a while.

[butwa20]

I want to breed them so will this spirulina be suitable food source for them to grown and breed on?

[LittleReef]

The spirulina is really for gut loading so you can feed your fish nutrient rich food.

I'm not sure about breeding them, honestly. I've never kept any past 5 days in the refrigerator. I always feed them out before that time. You might want to check around online and look up information about Sea Monkeys, as that is what Brine Shrimp are.

Also, you need light to hatch them, as well as an airline to keep the eggs suspended. The hatch over a 18-24 hour period. The higher the temperature, the faster they hatch. Do not exceed 81 degrees, though. At that point they will die.

[justahobby]

I don't think many people breed brine because of how cheap it is to hatch eggs versus having dedicated aquarium, food, time, etc to raise them. You don't have to worry about feeding them as they don't have a stomach or anus until a couple molts later. Until then they feed off the yolk sac which is what makes baby brine more nutritous than adults. They arent picky eaters (as with any shrimp) so finding the right food isn't as important as changing their salinity to match their breeding requirements, temperature, lighting, etc. Gooduck and please post a breeding thread so we can follow along

[Europhyllia]

eggs are dirt cheap. Not hatching them would be tougher than hatching them. Seriously.
I had one hatcher DRY in the garage over the summer. Decided to use the hatcher for cutluring phyto and after a few days noticed, my phyto contained brine! lol
The eggs had survived on the cone all through the summer heat, etc. in the garage.
Justahobby is right: the expense and effort of breeding them would by far exceed the cost of just getting the eggs in bulk.
But if it's something you enjoy doing our lending library has a great book on plankton culturing available to every charter member.

[butwa20]

So I am going to an experiment to see just how expensive and hard this is going to be. I have 3 different colonies going right now the only difference between them is going to be the food source.

[butwa20]

http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d38/Rentarox123/1298357343.jpg

These are the colonies u can see the babies in a line from top to bottom in the bottles

[butwa20]

http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d38/Rentarox123/1298357296.jpg

Here u can see I have marked them with the food I will be giving them.

[hobogato]

in my classroom, we raised them to about 14 days on phyto, and a few got in one of our rotifer cultures and lived much longer - grew to almost half an inch long.

[Third Coast Tropical]

I suggest scooping all those unhatched cysts off the top....or decanting and doing a water change.

[LittleReef]

You need airlines in there to keep circulation going.