Freshly hatched brine shrimp is great and not too difficult to do.
Baby Brine Shrimp
Here's what you would need:
- 2L coke bottle (7up botttle works just as well... )
- Some airline tubing
- Air pump
- Air valve
- Some stones
- Desktop lamp
- Brine shrimp eggs (you can get this from eBay or aquabid.com)
- Baking soda
- Aquarium salt
- Coffee filter
- Plastic cup
- Syringe (without needles!)
Steps to build:
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1. Remove the advertising material off the bottle so that it is completely clear. Wash them thoroughly.
2. Cut off the bottle at around 1/3 way from the top. Make sure you keep the cap!
3. Punch a hole through the cap using philips screw driver. The size should be slightly narrower than the thickness of the tube.
4. Insert the tube into the cap - make sure the tube shows about 1/4 inch from the inside of the cap. Screw the cap into the bottle.
5. Connect the other end of the tube to a valve, then continue to the air pump. You must be able to adjust the amount of air fed into this setup!
6. Put the stones into the bottom part of the bottle. This is to make sure that the whole bottle doesn't get tipped over easily.
7. Insert the top 1/3 with the tubing upside down.
That's it for the setup! Nice and cheap...
How to use it:
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1. Add some water into the top 1/3, until it fills up up to about 1 inch below the top line.
2. Turn on the air pump and control the valve until you get about 5 bubbles per second. It does not need to be vigorous.
3. Add 1/3 - 1/2 teaspoon full of baking soda and aquarium salt. Brine shrimps can only be hatched in a salty water, so you must do this.
4. Add about 1/3 to 1/2 teaspoon full of brine shrimp eggs. 1/3 seems to be enough for 2 days worth. If you have more than 2 tanks of fries to feed, I suggest at least 1/2 if not more.
5. Leave them on for 1 to 2 days. If your room temp is 70F or better, it usually starts to hatch in 24 hours. Hotter means faster hatch, cooler means slower hatch. Once hatched, you can leave it for two days and during these two days, you can extract them as often as you like.
How to extract:
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1. Stop the air pump. Note that you will see bright orange specks moving randomly and quickly. You can't mistake this for anything else...
2. Face the table lamp near where the cap is. Baby brine shrimps get attracted to lights, so if you place the light near the bottom, they will all move towards the bottom. This step can take few minutes.
3. Place a coffee filter on top of a cup or another bottom portion of 2L bottle. Make sure the center is slightly sunk to accomodate some water without spiling over.
4. Insert the syringe into the water, near the bottom and extract shrimps into it. This needs a bit of practice as if you do it too quickly, you will suck in quite a lot of egg shells as well. Egg shells do float, so it isn't impossible to separate them later on.
5. Pour shrimps (and water) on top of the filter. Wait until all water have been filtered off.
6. Now you have a choice - you can either "wash" this filter directly into the tank where you want to feed the shrimps, or you can reverse the filter, place it on another cup, and shoot water using the syringe so that most of the shrimps will drop into the new cup.
There! Baby brine shrimps are one of the best food you can provide for pretty much all fries. In fact, most adult fishes also thrive on this food as well. Once setup, it will be one of the cheapest source of food as well if you buy a decent size can. I've been feeding my fries for the past year, and I've only used up 1/3 of the can I purchased while back. The can only costed me $15 or so.
Good luck!
This is typical! It has happened to me too. I changed some plants from one tank to another, and ended up with having fry in that other tank!
