Newbie to hatching brine shrimp - need help!

[lauraf]

I know a wee bit about fish, but have never hatched my own brine shrimp from eggs before. I am desperate to do so ASAP, for the sake of new angelfish fry that are only sort of interested in the frozen BBS I have been giving them over the last few days. I bought a brine shrimp kit with an attachment to put the airstone into a plastic pop bottle along with the mixture of eggs/salt. It has been bubbling for almost 48 hours now, but I don't see anything other than the brownish eggs roiling about. I've had it directly under a light for fourteen hours/day in my kitchen. Am I doing this wrong? Should the bottle water be at a higher temp than room temp? Need help . . . .

 

[anshuman]

bbs looks v difficult to hatch , I would also suggest you to try decapsulated eggs for your fry , they are much smaller for fry's to consume,

Decapsulated Brine Shrimp Salt Lake Brine Shrimp

This takes just hour or so and you can keep it in deep-fridge for rest of the days. I am going to try it too.

 

[JRB__]

Aren't the kids toy 'Sea Monkeys' just BBS? they can't be that hard.... maybe just buy a bunch of sea monkey kits lol.

 

[anshuman]

instead of calling the hatch process hard, i would to call it as "too much time consuming", specially if you are in hurry to feed fry before they starve.

 

[tom91970]

I bought a kit once. I don't remember them taking too long to hatch.

 

[Newman]

temp of water has to be around 80F.
Salt isn't really necessary (but it'll have to do if its mixed in with the eggs) BBS can hatch in FW and actually stay alive longer in your tank because those hatched in brine water will suffer more osmotic shock when introduced to the FW aquarium and die within an hour or so...

Light is just there to make them swim to the surface for easier collection and to help warm the water. The warmer the water the faster they hatch.

They can hatch in colder water too (my house temps are low so the water here in an unheated BBS jar will be around 60F. This takes them well over 3 days to hatch) but they will hatch a lot slower.

I advise you add baking soda to the BBS jar to raise the pH. especially if your tap water's pH is on the acidic side. also never use untreated tap water because it kills the eggs...

O and one final thing: the less eggs you put into the jar, the more success you'll have in all of the hatching. reason being when there are too many eggs, they tend to secrete some mucous that clumps them together (even with airstone) and prevents them all from hatching...
A good amount of eggs to hatch at once is just 1/8 to 1/4 of a teaspoon worth of eggs.
This will mean that you'll need more hatching jars/bottles going...

 

[lauraf]

Thanks Newman - how much baking soda should I add per gallon? My tap water is pretty low - about 6.3ish? I use Bio Balance for my tank water to bring it above 6.5 . . . .
And ashuman, I've never heard of decapsulated brine shrimp eggs - is that readily available at a LFS?

 

[anshuman]

nope, i dont see decapsulated eggs in shop, Only dried eggs which we have to prepare either to hatch or decapsulate.

 

[lauraf]

So how do you prepare them to decapsulate?

 

[JRB__]

I believe he (anshuman) left a link in the post he initially mentioned it in.

Post #2 in this thread.

 

[anshuman]

i am just going out to get some home-bleach liquid and try this, i have full 100gm bag of bbs eggs and need to use it.

and yes, as JRB said, check the link posted above in this thread.

 

[OrangeCones]

My rasbora love it. Luckily, my LFS sells them in a jar.

 

[lauraf]

Oops, sorry folks! I am still kinda new to this forum and my computer fonts didn't show that anshuman's post had as a link. Wow, cool! Okay, that's tomorrow's project: decapsulating the brine shrimp. For now, my 18 or so angel-soldiers are soldiering on.

 

[lauraf]

Once most of the bbs hatch, do I need to keep them with aeration, or can I keep them in still water for another day or so while I start a new batch abubbling?

 

[Newman]

aeration. they'll die after a day or so anyway....plus they lose all of their nutritiousness after 24 hours so i don't see why you should keep them for any more than a day...

 

[lauraf]

Right, so if after they hatch, and in 24 hours are going to either A) die; or B) be of no value, why can't I keep the bbs in still water while I transfer the airtube to a new batch? This is kinda irrelevant now, as I have split my tubing so I can run two airstones at the same time

 

[Newman]

Loool. that's the way. i would imagine they would die faster w/o aeration because they would clump up ... I'm just rambling now, do what you want

 

[lauraf]

Teehee. My question above was more about the principle. I did put a hatch into a separate container without aeration yesterday just to see what happened. Most bbs were still swimming around after 24 hours, so if you want to be ghetto about hatching brine shrimp and only do one bottle/one airstone, logically, that would still give you brand new ones/live ones 24hrs/day. The only difficulty was separating the hatched/unhatched eggs from the live bbs, but a wee flashlight highlighted their location and I turkey-basted them right up.