Brine Shrimp

[ecotack]

I bough some brine shrimp eggs to raise them and feed them to the fish as a treat, but I can't seam to grow them to a decent size.

I bought one of those automated brine shrimp feeders, with an air line attached, that you place in the tank and when the shrimp is old enough it swims out and usually was eaten by the neons (the only thing that was small enough to see them). I blanked the outlet off to try and get them to grow for longer, but they just died.

Then I made a hatchery from a plastic bottle and air stone, still didn't live long.

I tried feeding them on sea monkey food and triop food, perhaps that's where I went wrong.

I tried fish tank water, ASDA bottled watter (use to be good for triops), boiled water and well aerated tap water (all with the dosage of aquarium salt it said on the package).

Hatch rate was good, just they didn't grow

Any advice?

 

[three-fingers]

How much were you feeding them? I never got far with my brine shrimp, but i managed to get a couple of them pretty far so that they looked like adults but were very small. They died when i neglected to feed them, because the water was still cloudy from a previous feeding, i feared i would pollute the water. Instead, they starved. Lesson learnt is, over feeding is probably better than over feeding.
I was feeding mine f a mixture of triops food and yeast, although the triops food needs to be ground down into very small particles using a mortar and pestle before its suitable for feeding the baby brine shrimp.
The most difficult thing about brine shrimp is probably the feeding, you never really know how much they need. Thats why all these kits are good, they provide food and tell you exactly how much you need.
If you still want to raise them, i would recommend buying specific brine shrimp food, like NT labs brine shrimp food.
Also, you never mentioned how many brine shrimp were in there, it could have been way over crowded and they all could have died from a fast build up of nitrogenous waste.
So for success, you should use as little eggs as possible .

 

[ecotack]

Possibly under fed them then.

I think the sea monkey food is just yeast. I don't think I over crowded, if you loured them to the top with a light you could have easily fit them on a tea spoon. The hatchery is made from a 3L Robinson's orange bottle

 

[three-fingers]

Yeah that doesnt sound over crowded . The sea monkey food is Spirulina and yeast so it should be good .