Growing Live Brine Shrimp
How to Prepare Live Food for a Saltwater Aquarium
Feeding Live Brine Shrimp to marine fish species is easy and inexpensive, especially when you grow, harvest and prepare it yourself.
Where to Purchase Live Brine Shrimp Eggs
It is possible to purchase Brine Shrimp Eggs from many places and them hatch them in your own hatchery. Inexpensive Brine Shrimp Eggs are readily available on E-Bay and from more traditional vendors such as Marine Depot, which sells the Ocean Nutrition Brine Shrimp Eggs ($6.99 for a 50g box). There are also specialty vendors like Brine Shrimp Direct which sell not only Brine Shrimp Eggs from the Great Salt Lake strains but also "San-Fran strain" Brine Shrimp Eggs (Artemia franciscana). Local fish stores also carry Brine Shrimp Eggs, but to ensure high hatch rates, only purchase Brine Shrimp Eggs that have been stored at an appropriate temperature (below 50-degrees).
Incubating the Live Brine Shrimp Eggs
Once you have the eggs and the hatchery set up, add premixed saltwater to your hatchery and then the appropriate amount of eggs (based on your hatchery size and the instructions that came with your Brine Shrimp Eggs). Allow the eggs to soak for 10-15 minutes (gently stirring from tome to time) in the saltwater before plugging in (or opening the valve on) the air pump. Once you have turned on the air pump, adjust the air flow so that the Brine Shrimp Eggs are suspended in the hatchery’s water column. With the lighting recommended in the DIY Brine Shrimp Hatchery article, the incubation period should be about 24 hours (may be longer if the water temperature in the hatchery is below 80-degrees).
Harvesting Live Brine Shrimp
Once the Brine Shrimp Eggs have hatched, you need to harvest them. Harvesting is relatively simple if you follow these three simple steps:
- Disconnect the air pump and let the hatchery settle for twenty minutes.
- Once the un-hatched eggs have settled to the bottom and the discarded egg shells have floated to the top, disconnect the plastic hose from the air pump (or valve, if you are using one), and use it to drain most of the hatchery water from the hatchery into a brine shrimp net. Be sure to stop draining the hatchery before the discarded egg shells are also drained through the plastic tubing into the net.
- Once the Live Brine Shrimp are in the net, it is advisable to soak them in a supplement before feeding them to your fish. The reason for this is that Live Brine Shrimp are actually relatively poor nutritionally-speaking.
Making Live Brine Shrimp More Nutritional
To bolster the nutritional value of newly-hatched Live Brine Shrimp, dump the Live Brine Shrimp from the Brine Shrimp Net into a holding container with pre-filtered freshwater mixed with either a liquid vitamin such as Viachem or an Omega 3 rich supplement like Kent Marine’s Zoecon, Selcon or H20 Life Aquarium Foods H2O Life V3 Vitamin/Amino Acids supplement (availavle from Vivid Aquariums for $5.99). Allow the Live Brine Shrimp to soak for twenty minutes and then feed them to your fish.
Additional Resources:
Making a DIY Brine Shrimp Hatchery
Brine Shrimp and Ecology of Great Salt Lake (from USGS)
Why Use "San-Fran strain" Brine Shrimp Eggs (Artemia franciscana)
