Hatching brine shrimp

Lady G

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Oct 6, 2005
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Ok I am trying to hatch brine shrimp I found the article here on how to do it and am following it, my question is....can I hatch and then freeze some for later use and if so how would I do this, just suck them out rinse them and put them in ice trays or something like that?

Thanks,

Gin
 
Hi, I rinsed them very well and added them to water. Then I poured them on a piece of saran wrap on a dinner plate. Stuck the plate in the freezer. When frozen I broke the ice into the portion sizes I needed and put them in a tupperware in the freezer.
Cathy
 
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Hey, I did a similar thing to cathy except that I had an ice tray that made smallish cups. The usefull thing is that the ic cube cups were rounded at the bottom. So i filtered the newly hatched bbs (baby brine shrimp), rinsed them and then just added a drop into the bottom of each ice cube cup. I also added a drop or 2 of water and this made little bbs ice pellets about 1cm across and a fee millimetres thick. Worked great. Could make about 12 at a time.
 
SynoSteff said:
Hey, I did a similar thing to cathy except that I had an ice tray that made smallish cups. The usefull thing is that the ic cube cups were rounded at the bottom. So i filtered the newly hatched bbs (baby brine shrimp), rinsed them and then just added a drop into the bottom of each ice cube cup. I also added a drop or 2 of water and this made little bbs ice pellets about 1cm across and a fee millimetres thick. Worked great. Could make about 12 at a time.

That is kinda what I had in mind, but I was wondering do you just plop the "ice cube" in the tank or did you "defrost" it first before feeding?
 
I use leftover trays when I buy frozen brine shrimp.

I hatch the bbs then suck them up with a turkey baster..I then squirt them into a funnel that has a coffee filter ...I rinse with de-chlor water then suck the bbs back up and squirt them into the lil trays..freeze and they are ready for use..
you can either stick the small ice cube bbs concenstrate in a tank or I prefer, to put a cube or two into a shot glass..use the t-baster to melt the cubes in the shotglass with a bit of tank water then use the turkey baster to place the bbs near the young fry...I use this method to help introduce crushed flake at week 4-5 mix with bbs and crushed flake then wean the fry off bbs to crushed flake.
 
Thanks everyone!!!
 
Just another idea ... dunno if it will be worth your while though but....

You can try decapsulate your brine shrimp eggs.

Effectively, you remove the egg shell of the brine shrimp egg and this leaves a naked embryo. You can then store these embryos in a super-saturated salt solution in the freezer and then hatch what you need. The advantage come in with the hatching. First of all, hatch rate is higher cause non get stuck in the eggs. And secondly, you can feed hatched and unhatched embryos to your fry cause you dont need to worry about the eggs getting stuck in their intestines. So you dont need to seperate out the hatched and unhatched shells from the hatched brine shrimp :)

If you're interested I can help with a recipe.

For me, seperating out the hatched and unhatched brine shrimp is the hardest part (know any neat tricks????) so i just decapsulate a bunch, which I then use to grow a batch of fry with.

Hope all works out

SynoSteff
 
Whats the recipe?

Synosteff - seperating the bbs and cysts is tricky! What is your recipe for decapsulating them? I'd be very interested...

There are some great ideas here - the reusing the bs trays for tiny ice cubes -thanks star_rider.

The 2 most valuable 'non-fish' tools I have are my shot glass and turkey baster. I'd be lost without them!

Cathy
 
I think something must be wrong with my eggs, they are just like little dust particles and I didn't get any "bright" orange stuff on the bottom of my "hatching" bottle?

If you can decapulate yours then what I have can't be right they are just little tiny specs of brown stuff is that what they are suppose to be like?

They were sent to me in three small zip lock baggies with rock salt type stuff, the instructions said to add the packet into water, with the airstone and keep it at 83 for 24 hours. Is this correct? I did add the tbs of baking soda to it also.
 
Hey there,

The eggs do look like light brown dust and your instructions do sound right. Once you turn off the air, the unhatched and empty eggs should float up to the surface and the hatched bbs should swim to the bottom. They are very tiny, so maybe you just aren't looking hard enough. Hehe :)
One way to find them is to turn off your room lights and then shine a torch or something into the bottom corner of your hatching container and leave it for 10 or 15 min. The bbs should crowd around the light and if you look closely you can see them all moving and jiggling about. If your eggs are old they might take a touch longer to hatch but if there is still nothing after 48-72 hours then I reckon you got a dud batch :( but I may be wrong.

I have personally never used baking soda

I will post the recipe just now ... just need to find it ;)

Not the easiest thing in the world to do but it works

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