brine shrimp vs decapsulated brine shrimp
- Thread starter theemon
- Start date
What a brilliant idea.
Of course you mention it after I spent a an hour or so building and mounting a rack for upside down pop bottles. ;-)
I suppose I can store fish food on it.
What do you do for aeration? Please.
Andy, any chance you can post a pic of your setup? I, too, am also curious about how you set up the aeration on it.
Hey d and d,
I will post some pics as soon as I find my camera card (my wife hides them!). I have a central air system, so I just have a line running to the brine shrimp station but you could use an air pump to accomplish the same thing. I have a hole drilled in the cap of the container and just run the air hose and stone through the hole and into the container, works like a charm.
I will post some pics as soon as I find my camera card (my wife hides them!). I have a central air system, so I just have a line running to the brine shrimp station but you could use an air pump to accomplish the same thing. I have a hole drilled in the cap of the container and just run the air hose and stone through the hole and into the container, works like a charm.
I've just recently tried my hand at actively rearing fry so my experience compared to others on this site is very limited. With that in mind, there are a lot of knowledgeable folks on this site (like jetajockey for instance) so I'd heed their advice & ask as many questions as you can. BTW - Thanks jetajockey for your advice the other evening, it was really helpful.
However, hatching brine shrimp is pretty easy. NO special salt needed. All I use is regular table salt, not iodized salt, just plain. I use about 1 table spoon of salt per litre of water (I use 2 litre soda bottles as my hatcheries), & a pinch (however much I get in between my index finger & thumb) of baking soda to get the ph to 8 (this is an ideal ph for brine shrimp), & regular tap water.
A 1lb., 10oz "tin" of salt costs me about 50 cents & a 16 oz box of All purpose Baking soda runs me about another 60 cents at my local grocers. So making a hatching solution is fairly inexpensive.
I've never tried decapsulating my brine shrimp eggs. I've come to understand (just like you have) that they are higher in protein, are smaller & thus easier for fry to consume, & that since the cysts (egg shells) have been removed there is less likelihood that the fry will get empty cysts lodged in their digestive tracts which in turn will decrease mortality rates.
But even with all of the benefits associated with using decaped bbs I still haven't come around to doing it. And I may never bother with it myself, maybe because it seems like a bit more effort than is really absolutely necessary (perhaps time will change my mind). And after reading a lot of these posts, it seems like it's really up to you. Decaped or not, seems like your bbs will benefit either way
However, hatching brine shrimp is pretty easy. NO special salt needed. All I use is regular table salt, not iodized salt, just plain. I use about 1 table spoon of salt per litre of water (I use 2 litre soda bottles as my hatcheries), & a pinch (however much I get in between my index finger & thumb) of baking soda to get the ph to 8 (this is an ideal ph for brine shrimp), & regular tap water.
A 1lb., 10oz "tin" of salt costs me about 50 cents & a 16 oz box of All purpose Baking soda runs me about another 60 cents at my local grocers. So making a hatching solution is fairly inexpensive.
I've never tried decapsulating my brine shrimp eggs. I've come to understand (just like you have) that they are higher in protein, are smaller & thus easier for fry to consume, & that since the cysts (egg shells) have been removed there is less likelihood that the fry will get empty cysts lodged in their digestive tracts which in turn will decrease mortality rates.
But even with all of the benefits associated with using decaped bbs I still haven't come around to doing it. And I may never bother with it myself, maybe because it seems like a bit more effort than is really absolutely necessary (perhaps time will change my mind). And after reading a lot of these posts, it seems like it's really up to you. Decaped or not, seems like your bbs will benefit either way
I use decap eggs for fry without issues. It's quick clean and easy with no fuss. I need to keep things simple and feeding them straight out of the package can't be any easier. After fry are grown, I still feed them as a treat not as the main meal. My small fish go crazy for them.
they arrived today so tonight ill setup something
excuzzzeme do you decap your bbs yourself or do you purchase them that way? (can they even be purchased that way?) If so how do you do it? Do you use chlorine bleach to decap them? Or do you use some other method?
Sorry for the barrage of questions. I'm just curious to know if there is more than one method. The one method I saw using chlorine bleach looked kind of sloppy, so it kind of turned me off to using it. (Maybe it wasn't the method itself but the demonstration).
