I am considering buying a brine shrimp hatcher that hangs on tank. I wonder though why you can't just add the eggs to the refugium. Will they not hatch? If they will is it possible to get a reproducing population established in your tank, or do they need a dormant/dry period as eggs?
brine shrimp
- Thread starter red71veloce
- Start date
if you get eggs without cycsts, you can just add them to the tank. Though as you will find out when trying to hatch brine shrimp, all the shells get left behind, rot and decompose, and also, they could kill corals and small fish. But if you put the cyst-free brine shrimp in the tank (i believe ORA makes some), they are unlikely to even reach a hatching level because they will be taken out by your protien skimmer, your corals will eat the eggs (which is why ORA makes them without cysts, to feed corals), they will be caught in your mechanical filtration, ect. But those HOB brine shrimp hatchers are a rip off if you ask me. They sell one, it is just a platform and some airline tubing. spend 5 bucks on an airpump and airstone, and get a two litter soda bottle and cut off the top. It even comes with eggs. And then you have a brine shrimp hatcher.
Brine shrimp cyst can and sometimes do harbour harmful bacteria that can literally wipe out your system at the worst case scenario.
With what I have invested I'm not about to risk that no matter how low the odds are, especially when it's so easy to hatch them in my two litre bottles. Also, cysts have occasionally got caught in the digestive tracts of fish, causing problems at best and death at worst.
Safest way to use them would be to decap them before hatch out.
RAISING LIVE BRINE SHRIMP TO ADULT
(Excellent links at the bottom of my brine page.)
With what I have invested I'm not about to risk that no matter how low the odds are, especially when it's so easy to hatch them in my two litre bottles. Also, cysts have occasionally got caught in the digestive tracts of fish, causing problems at best and death at worst.
Safest way to use them would be to decap them before hatch out.
RAISING LIVE BRINE SHRIMP TO ADULT
(Excellent links at the bottom of my brine page.)