brine shrimp

[cutechic]

i'd like to turn my 1 gallon freshwater tank into a brine shrimp hatchery, so i can feed my fish some live food

how many of the eggs will actually hatch?
how large do brine shrimp grow?

the reason i'm asking is that i dont have very many fish, so i dont want to have too many shrimp to handle

 

[Dragonslair]

1 gallon tank is really too big to hatch the number you're looking to rear. Why not try a brine shrimp hatchery, you can buy them from most good lfs.
How many will hatch?- Well how long is a piece of string? Sorry to sound flippant, but there is just no way of knowing. A lot depends on the quality of the eggs, where they were gathered and the condition of the eggs when the were stored.
Brine shrimps are 1/2 the size of daphnia(water flea)
Why not try your fish on fresh frozen live food first to see which they prefer before going to all this trouble to find that they don't like it. Most aquatic stores have a frozen compartment containing blister packs of various frozen food. These foodstuffs have been irradiated to rid them of all the nasties that are associated with live food and all you need to do is pop them out of their blister pack, thaw them and then feed them to your fish. There are several types of food, most favorites are the humble bloodworm larvae and daphnia. Try it first. It's economical and clean without all the setting up of breeding live food. Remember brine shrimp live only a few days, so if you do want to breed them you will need to make regular batches up.

 

[cutechic]

i guess i could try that. . . i dont really like feeding my fish frozen food. i tried frozen bloodworm larvae before, and it clouded up my tank. i guess i could try feeding them frozen food again.

thx for your advice

 

[Dragonslair]

It'll only cloud your water if you've overfed them and there are bloodworm decomposing in the substrate. Cloudy water usually means a bacterial bloom, and bacteria only bloom if there's food for them to do so. Ergo no food, no bloom.

 

[cutechic]

ok i'll feed them less frozen food this time

 

[Jamnog]

well i spose you could get most of the brine shrimp to hatch i would say more than 90% of mine hatched under a hotish light. there where instuctions on the tube. i agree that its quite a big tank to use just for brine shrimp allot of people hatch them up in a tray and feed em to the fish after a few days. if i was going to get a food for my fish i would go to my local pond and quarantine some dafni and some cyclops. cold water particulate live foods such as this will not only live but might breed so if you get a jam jar and a net and go to your local pond get some of thease and when you put them in ure 1 gal tank check to see that you dont hav eany hydra or leaches leave them to carry on for a few weeks see if they like the alge that grows keep a snail in there with them. and sieve some out once in a while. dont do this if you have a £/$100 fish as there is (imo an extreemly slim) chance the water may carry some parasite or disease.

 

[dolphin]

Hi cutechic

Ok. A one gallon tank will be fine for growing on a small amount of brine shrimp, but as Dragon has said it will not be any good for hatching them. You can use a jar to hatch the eggs, I use a 1.5 liter jar to hatch mine. Once they have hatched, after about 36 hours. You can transfer them to the 1 gall tank. Feed on liquidfry No1, Only 1 drop per day, and a small drop at that.

The brine shrimp eggs that I sell have a hatching rate of 232,000 shrimp per gram of eggs. This is a hatch rate of about 93%. If you hatch too many, you can feed some of the newly hatched shrimp to your fish, and only grow on the ammount that the tank will handle.

The Brine shrimp will reach a size of around 1cm.

HTH

 

[cutechic]

yes, thats a big help dolphin and jamnog.

i have never seen dafni and cyclops in the ponds where i live. . . perhaps i'm not looking in the right places

ok, i'll buy some brine shrimp eggs and the bottle and such, and see how it goes. wish me luck!