brine shrimp eggs

[Smax]

hi guys. just got some brine shrimp eggs and was wondering how to hatch them and what i need. any ideas would be helpful thanks

[evilknieval69]

Get a coke bottle (or similiar) and cut the bottom off it. Turn it upside down and mount it in a tank or somewhere where it will stay at 24 degrees (or thereabouts) and put an airstone in it (make sure the airstone goes right to the bottom of the now inverted bottle so no eggs can settle on the bottom) then either make up a salt water mix to the correct salinity (im not sure how much salt to water you need as i use option two) or go get some saltwater from the sea (get the clearest water possible).

Once you have your saltwater in the bottle and it is up to the correct temp them put half a teaspoon or so of BS eggs into the bottle, and 24 hours (or so) later, you have baby brine shrimp (bbs)

To get them out of the bottle, turn the airstone off (or take it out) and wait for it to settle (about 10 minutes) the hatched eggs will be floating at the top, the unhatched eggs will have sunk to the bottom, and the hatched shrimp will be floating just above the unhatched eggs. I use a turkey baster and suck them out into another container, but you could syphon them out with a piece of airline or something if you wanted

HTH

[alanmin4304]

I use 50gm salt/litre 7 a small pinch of baking soda.

[Barrie]

if you want to have a "battery "system and keep the bbs going send me a pm with your email address and I will email what Alan told me to do... works really well

I feed bbs every morning and evening and also use salt water from the wet stuff surrounding NZ.

I gather enough for a couple of weeks so that I dont have to keep on makeing the effort to go down to the waterfront

[SpidersWeb]

Thoroughly recommend getting some NZ Brine Shrimp, I beleive AMAZONIAN on here has some for sale, or might know where to get it.

The stuff you buy in those little test tubes with the black lids I've found to be frustrating to hatch, overpriced, and sometimes impossible to hatch. The NZ ones are fantastic, and that's an understatement, you'll get the bright orange pulp you should get when harvesting these guys.

With that out of the way, the upside down coke bottle is what I've always used. Don't forget to add a generous amount of baking soda to the water mix, a pH above 8 made a big difference. I used the coffee filters (like $5 from supermarket) to seperate the bbs from the saltwater.

[Wok]

The advantage of the NZ produced BBS is that they are smaller than the imported ones so smaller fry can eat them.