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Feeding your fish live food

Hatching brine shrimp. Hello everyone. This is Brinegar. Raleigh of fish keeping jamaica asked me to shoot a piece on the easiest live fish food, sea monkeys or brine shrimp. Brine shrimp or Artemia salina are very easy to hatch.

What you need

I mix eight tablespoons of pickling salt to one gallon of hot water, and my water is already very hard. So I don’t add any baking soda. But if you do have soft water, you can add about one teaspoon of baking soda per gallon of water. That should make it sufficiently hard for you to hatch brine shrimp. And I find that I get the best hatch rate if I buy the premium grade brine shrimp eggs from brine shrimp direct and you can get this eight ounce size, which will last for quite a few years for a small scale aquarist and the last one I used probably lasted me three or four years. And they were still viable when I got to the very last ones.

Now brine shrimp eggs, brine shrimp nauplii or nuclei, which are the newly hatched brine shrimp, are a great food for guppy fry. But they’re too big for white cloud minnow fry to consume at first. So you have to start them on something smaller. Some people have success with pulverized flake food. It’s probably best to have some sort of live food like vinegar eels or microworms. I don’t have that so I’m struggling to keep these white cloud fry alive long enough, so that they’re large enough to consume live brine nauplii.

The hatching brine shrimp method

Following is a clip of a newly hatched white cloud fry still stuck to the glass. I find that i get the best hatch rate out of these shrimp at about 78 degrees and a little bit of bowl heater keeps this amount of fresh water at that temperature. Also keep a lid over the bucket to help conserve the heat. The jar brine with shrimp eggs on the right they’ve been in brine for 48 hours.

I’ll clean off the excess. The jar on the left, those eggs have been in the brine for 24 hours. So most of them have have sunk and when I add the air stone. Now I won’t lose many eggs by sticking them to the sides of the glass. I’ll add that air stone and remove these for feeding.

Now I have a fresh jar of brine. There I’ll add the brine shrimp eggs and most will sink after 24 hours and it’ll be time to repeat the process. I set the jar of brine shrimp nauplii in a room with one light source. So after five ten minutes, most of the nauplii will either approach the light source or go as far away from it as possible. So it’ll Be easy to take a turkey baster and remove them without sucking up any or many fine shrimp eggs in 15 minutes. So I’ll use the turkey baster to remove the shrimp furthest away from the light, and also remove shrimp that were drawn towards the light.

Use two brine shrimp nets

I’d like to point out that I’m using two brown shrimp nets. If you use only one, you’ll lose a lot of the shrimp. There’s a treat of brine shrimp nuclei for my adult white cloud minnows.,

Brine shrimp eggs and hatcheries on Amazon are here