Decapsulating Brine eggs is not a necessary step, but it is useful. Undecapsulated eggs can lead to swim bladder problems in young fry. When you decapsulate you will wind up with a higher hatch rate and you'll find the eggs hatch quicker.

First..fill a large jar 2/3 of the way with clean, cool water. Allow yourself enough space to add bleach later. You'll want 2/3 water to 1/3 bleach.



Add your brine eggs, you can do as much or as little as you'd like at a time. I prefer to do a few tablespoons full at a time, to avoid this step for a few weeks. Let the eggs soak for a few minutes.


Now turn on the aerator, this will tumble and rejuvenate the Artemia eggs. Let them tumble like this for a couple of hours, occasionally give it a swirl to get the eggs that are lying on the bottom.


Now,gently pour in the bleach.


Quickly the eggs will turn colors, from white to tan to orange..




In the meantime get a bowl and add 1 cup of cool water and 1 tablespoon of Vinegar. You will need this to neutralize the bleach in a minute.

When they are orange,pull the air and strain the eggs through a baby brine shrimp net. You may want to test your net ahead of time because I have gone through all of these steps only to have 80% of my eggs go down the sink.


Strain the eggs, rinse them and then dip the net in your vinegar solution, then rinse again until all of the bleach/vinegar smell is gone. Now they're ready to go.
To store them in the fridge you just need to put a heavy salt solution in a jar and keep them there. They will stay in a suspended animation for months.

awesome thanks kelly

Anything for you

Can eggs decapsulated in this manner be fed direstly to the fry, or is this strictly for pre-hatching?

What happens to the egg shells? Do they just dissolve away?

Yes, you can feed them directly to the fry this way if you like
And the shell's disintegrate into a clear, membrane-type, thin shell.

For some bizarre reason it was a lot cheaper for me to buy decapslated eggs than capsulated ones.... Which I thought was odd.

i know that no one has posted on this in like forever... well i got a ?...

i know that it helps the fry, and that you get more bbs... but what exactly does it do to the eggs?

It removes the shell, a part that is useless and many times harmful to fry.