Brine Shrimp

Thanks again guys I appreciate all your responses I will weigh in everything you have given me

 

wait how do i load up bbs with meds? What should I start adding to their food?

 

What meds are you wanting to use for what problems?
If you have medicated flake food, you can pulverize it and feed it to the brine shrimp and then feed the shrimp to the fish.
If it is a liquid, then it has to be emulsified so that there is particulate matter that can be captured and passed to the digestive tract for ingestion.
Not as effective but can work is to soak spirulina powder with Seachem Focus and medication, feeding that to the brine.
For best results, you need to blend in a blender for two minutes to micronize particulate size suitable for the brine to ingest.
In answer to your first post, you CAN set up a continuous culture of brine shrimp but it make take some number of tries to be successful at it.
I use a standard mesh net to harvest adults, leaving the smaller brine to continue growing and reproducing.
When water conditions are suitable then they will produce live brine.
If conditions change they may then produce cysts.
I use 26g rubbermaid containers for my cultures.
brine shrimp

 

@rayray How big of a mesh do I need to harvest adults to the babies? I currently only have 75 micron mesh. Do you think 150 micron mesh will work?

 

It may be my old age, but I find your query to be confusing and so I'm not really sure how to answer you.
The bags I buy to make my nets come from Brine Shrimp Direct and are rated 250 mesh (about 57 microns) that I use for rotifers, and 150 mesh (about 100 microns) that I use for brine shrimp nauplii.
For larger brine I use standard fish nets that capture the adults but leave the small nauplii to pass through so they can remain in the culture to grow larger.
I have no idea what the mesh size of these nets are.

 

We feed our mandarins a mix of foods that includes lots of decapped brine shrimp eggs. Before they hatch, all the nutrition is in the egg. The mandarins love them. Had the fish for two years.

Why bother hatching?

 

hmm good point for target feeding, but that won't keep them free floating/swimming which will elicit a better feeding response

 

As long as your pumps aren't churning the bottom (we have an mp40 on there, but set low with the occasional peak), the eggs tend to settle out and the mandarins will be picking at invisible stuff aggressively for hours after feeding. This wouldn't work for sea horses, but for the little spotted gobies, it works great.

 

Rayjay - I was a tad confused in reading your write up on hatching brine...at the beginning you mentioned you added in 4 ML of 5% bleach to the eggs but then later in red (I assume this is an updated part) you add in quite a bit of straight bleach...is the writing in red the better method?

 

OK, the first statement is as says, "To sterilize the cysts, add 4ml of 5% bleach". Even so, you can go with more bleach and less time to do the job.
The "Decapping" process is one cup of bleach added to the 2 cups of water the cysts have been soaking/aerated in.
However, I've discovered that not all bleaches are alike, even if they specify the same concentration.
I buy the bleach on sale so I use different ones often, and I adjust to the strength be it Walmarts cheapie at 4% or a Grocery store one at 6%. (some I've bought don't even specify which I find odd)
I've found though that the more common 5+% differ from brand to brand for some reason and I've had to adjust the time of bleaching, or, the amount of bleach to add to get best results.
Now, at the start of a newly purchased bottle, I'm aware that I have to sometimes compensate so I look closely for the colour change of the cysts so that I can let the bleaching go longer if the process appears to be incomplete.
Occasionally I let the time go too long and the cysts won't hatch.
I'm actually sterilizing most times now instead of decapping, just as a personal preference, as I have better luck with separation of live from the garbage so I'm not transferring as much garbage to the grow out containers.
I let the culture sit without air for about 5 minutes and then siphon off EVERYTHING except the floating empty cysts.
I clean the container of the floaters and pour the siphoned off live and unhatched cysts back into the container and let sit again.
I repeat this last step by siphoning down to the point I don't suck up unhatched cysts and resting garbage until most live are harvested. I dump the rest but occasionally aerate again for a day to see how many more hatch out. This lets me know that I'm maximizing the yields and that I'm harvesting at the correct time, or, I have to leave the initial hatch longer.
For most people the hatching is a simple task, but for me and the amount I use (growing to adults to feed my seahorses) it took me a while to "get the right touch" to succeed in the grow out process at high density growth.
I use a heaping tablespoon each hatch but most people would probably be using between 1/8th and 1/4 teaspoon .