Baby Brine Shrimp
BBS (Artemia franciscana)
Introduction
You are hopefully going to be raising many fry, get familiar with BBS culture as this will be a mainstay for you. Baby brine shrimp are probably the best food you can give to developing fry. You can create a homemade hatchery if you are handy, however as this is such a critical piece of equipment you maybe better served to buy a commercial solution e.g. from JBL. Get 2 hatcheries and alternate the feeding from each. I have a little red cap that I hang on the next hatchery to use as it takes over 24 hours for the eggs to hatch and you need to be feeding at least daily if you can.
Preserving Egg Quality
The critical part with BBS is getting high quality eggs. You can buy none-viable eggs used as a food in their own right, you obviously don’t want these for culturing. When the BBS eggs arrive, you need to aliquot them into smaller sealed bags and store them in a sealed container in a freezer. The eggs need to stay dry so add some uncooked rice and/or water absorbing packets.The active sealed bag of eggs should be kept in the fridge again within a small sealed container with rice.
Salt concentration
I use 1 teaspoon of salt per 500ml hatchery and dissolve in regular chlorinated tap water. You are aiming for a specific gravity of 1.018. While you might get away with using table salt it is better to use a purer salt e.g. sea or kosher salt. The salt water can be reused for several days depending on the numbers of shrimp being hatched. You may want to add a pinch of Sodium Bicarbonate to raise the pH if your tap water is acidic.
Hatching conditions
Steady but not too strong air flow is required. Optionally you can add a light (24hrs) that may improve hatch rate. Hatching takes between 24-36 hours.
Harvesting
I use a 0.15mm filter also from JBL. Switch off the airpump. Place a light at the bottom of the funnel and after 5mins or so the brine shrimp will collect at the bottom. Open the tap and drain the active brine shrimp through the filter and trap egg shells and unhatched eggs in the funnel. Clean the funnel and start the process off again.
References