Sea Monkeys?

[Videl]

Can freshwater tropical fish eat sea monkeys?

 

[Ewok]

Yup, sea monkeys are just brine shrimp & every fish seems to know what they are & devour them with gusto!!!

 

[Ami]

Ah...I was thinking about this the other day!

You can buy sea monkeys on line ('just add water!') and it seems like a good source of live food, as my LFS only gets live brine shrimp, blood worms and daphinia in on a Saturday morning and it's gone by the afternoon!

Think I'll give it a try - once I actually have fish that is.

Ami

 

[Dubby]

Ah...I was thinking about this the other day!

You can buy sea monkeys on line ('just add water!') and it seems like a good source of live food, as my LFS only gets live brine shrimp, blood worms and daphinia in on a Saturday morning and it's gone by the afternoon!

Think I'll give it a try - once I actually have fish that is.

Ami

Buy them as Shellless Artemia at the LFS or online and they work out cheaper. See http/www.waterlife.co.uk/waterlife/foods.htm

 

[Mr Miagi]

Yes, make your own DIY brine shrimp hatchery, and raise your own. Quite simple and effective. When you buy the eggs, you simply get thousands, so its quite cheap in the long run, although the initial cost of the artemia eggs are expensive!

 

[Ami]

About £3.50 here in the UK (just did a quick google!), which seems quite reasonable when I would normally get 9 lil bags of live brine shrimps for that!

 

[trisha1972]

You can buy them here in Wal-mart. They are in a little box in the fish department that says triops. When I was teaching science for middle schoolers I'd always buy them and keep on my desk in a bowl.

 

[dwarfgourami]

Are triops and brine shrimps/sea monkeys really the same? I thought brine shrimps lived in salt water. Triops, according to my Guide to British Wildlife, live in the New Forest, which can hardly be very saline. Or are the ones you buy a different species?

 

[Snailguy101]

I remember when I had sea monkeys when I was little they come in a little plastic case and you can only see them in the darkand stuff

 

[masterfishes]

triops and sea monkey/brine shrimp r two completly dif animals

 

[Opcn]

Triops grow to be about 3 inches long, brine shrimp are lucky to reach 1/4th of an inch. Dont buy seamonkeys buy brineshrimp eggs, deshelled work better. Goodluck

 

[jenica86]

if you want hatch kits, try San Francisco Bay BRand I've fed them to my fish for years and they love it! i first tried it when mt dad became the manager of one of their shrimp operations

 

[LifeBear]

I can't believe (meaning I am flabbergasted, not that I don't believe you) that your lfs would only carry live brine shrimp. They have almost no nutritional value at that point. They are really only very good for fish food when they are less than 24 hours old. I find it hard to believe that live BS being sold at a sdtore are less than 24 hours old. Sheesh.

Don't buy "Sea Monkeys" buy brine shrimp eggs. Hatch them out and feed right away. They are great for small fish and fry. Larger fish often don't care as much.

 

[CFC]

They would have to be very small fish, 24 hour old brineshrimp are just a little bigger than a grain of sand.
Unless you are raising fry or keeping filter feeders hatching brine shrimp is pretty a worthless exercise as it is difficult and time consuming to raise large numbers of artemia to a size where they of use as a food source for average sized adult fish. A much easier way of getting cheap live food is to keep daphnia in a outdoor pool, simply buy a couple of bags of live daphnia from the lfs to start your culture off and add them to the pool/container of dechlorinated water. Within a couple of weeks your culture will be large enough for you to start harvesting them to feed them to your fish.

 

[Ami]

They don't carry just the live brineshrimp. They also sell it in the usual freezedried tubs. They also sell live daphinia and blood worms at the weekend.

But I really didn't know that about them losing their nutritional value. Just did a google search and it says they are only any good for 8 hours because after that they use of the nutrion themselves with their rapid growth spurts. Not much of a weekend treat for them after all!

Regarding Daphinia, I've been advised to simply seed my garden water butt with them. Then I can use the normal method of removing them from the water in the evening when I water the garden.

I've also been told to just leave a bucket of old tank water outside and it will soon be crawling with mossie larvae so I'm thinking of trying that soon.

Will let you know how I get on.