Brine Shrimp Heat

[HomerJay]

When hatching baby brine shrimp, what temperature is ideal? At what point does it become too hot?

thanks,

 

Aaron

[Bill]

80 - 82 is usually ideal for hatching in 24 hours, don't exceed 85. Lower temps in the 70s will hatch but take longer. I've found that a 40 watt bulb in one of those clip on desk lamps right over the water keeps it at 80 degrees.

[AtomCatMatt]

80 to 82 degrees will give your fastest hatch times. colder will increase it, and i would not go above 86 degrees 

 

[AtomCatMatt]

1 minute ago, Bill said:

80 - 82 is usually ideal for hatching in 24 hours, don't exceed 85. Lower temps in the 70s will hatch but take longer. I've found that a 40 watt bulb in one of those clip on desk lamps right over the water keeps it at 80 degrees.

beat me to the punch

 

[Bekah]

this may be a silly question but... when you harvest the BBS by having them gather to a light source and then drain them, there is always some that are still floating around. I feel bad sending them down the drain, is there a way to keep them alive to feed later or grow into adults? 

[AtomCatMatt]

I personally have never raised them up all the way, but this video is seems very informative.

[HomerJay]

that's awesome, thank you

 

[tolstoy21]

@Bekah  This is what I do with my extra ones, instead of the drain.

 

Pretty much just three gallons of salt water in a bucket with an inexpensive, small heater and some vigorous bubbles. I feed them a pinch of sera micron every morning and they grow out fine. Maybe once a day i stir the bucket to get settled food back into the water column.  

I did use some RO fittings to make a permanent, rigid air line in the side of this thing so I'm always bubbling at the bottom of the bucket, but that's overkill and an inclination to tinker on my part.

Only maintenance for this is an occasional top off with RO water to ensure the salinity doesn't rise too high due to evaporation. One could probably use distilled or rain water for this as well I'd guess. I make the water with Instant Ocean. One bag lasts me a while.

The black marker line on the side of the bucket is my water level for three gallons. As it drops a bit below that, I know it's time to top off a bit. 

I don't grow out massive amounts, but I do get enough to net out and feed some fish (I certainly cant sustain my tanks on its yield alone). Those that avoid the net long enough spawn babies themselves.

I run this a while. Then when I think it's starting to foul (and I have no real rule around this other than looking in and thinking, yeah that's getting pretty murky looking), I then net  out all the shrimp, feed them to fish, clean the bucket and start over. 

Like I said, you don't get tons, but you do grow out those leftovers and can enjoy watching fish get excited chasing  and gobbling up larger brine.

For me it's just another project of interest, just to see if I can accomplish it successfully.  There is no real science behind what I do other than common sense. This is to say is that I don't find growing out brine shrimp to be that hard if you follow some simple, reasonable guidelines -- Keep some food suspended in the water via the bubbles. Keep the temp reasonable. Check salinity and top off every now and again.

Oh, and don't over crowd the bucket. Like don't dump that initial thick, dark, orange stream of BBS into that bucket. You want a reasonable amount in there. Whats a reasonable amount? No clue. Less than whats in that thick dark orange stream. I do fine using just the few left overs swimming around the very top of the BBS water.

I also occasionally replenish their numbers with a drop or two of concentrated BBS taken from the swarm at the bottom of the hatchery, with a pipette. But go easy with that. A few drops from that orange swarm is a lot of shrimp. 

Edited October 21, 2020 by tolstoy21

[Bekah]

5 minutes ago, tolstoy21 said:

@Bekah  This is what I do with my extra ones, instead of the drain.

 

Pretty much just three gallons of salt water in a bucket with an inexpensive, small heater and some vigorous bubbles. I feed them a pinch of sera micron every morning and they grow out fine. Maybe once a day i stir the bucket to get settled food back into the water column.  

I did use some RO fittings to make a permanent, rigid air line in the side of this thing so I'm always bubbling at the bottom of the bucket, but that's overkill and an inclination to tinker on my part.

Only maintenance for this is an occasional top off with RO water to ensure the salinity doesn't rise too high due to evaporation. One could probably use distilled or rain water for this as well I'd guess. I make the water with Instant Ocean. One bag lasts me a while.

The black marker line on the side of the bucket is my water level for three gallons. As it drops a bit below that, I know it's time to top off a bit. 

I don't grow out massive amounts, but I do get enough to net out and feed some fish (I certainly cant sustain my tanks on its yield alone). Those that avoid the net long enough spawn babies themselves.

I run this a while. Then when I think it's starting to foul (and I have no real rule around this other than looking in and thinking, yeah that's getting pretty murky looking), I then net  out all the shrimp, feed them to fish, clean the bucket and start over. 

Like I said, you don't get tons, but you do grow out those leftovers and can enjoy watching fish get excited chasing  gobbling up larger brine.

For me it's just another project of interest, just to see if I can accomplish it successfully.  I have no real science behind what I do other than common sense. All of which to say is my feeling is growing out brine shrimp is not hard if you follow some simple, reasonable guidelines -- Keep some food suspended in the water via the bubbles. Keep the temp reasonable. Check salinity and top off every now and again.

Oh, and don't over crowd the bucket. Like don't dump that initial thick, dark, orange stream of BBS into that bucket. You want a reasonable amount in there. Whats a reasonable amount? No clue. Less than whats in that thick dark orange stream. I do fine with just use the few left overs swimming around the very top of the BBS water.

I also occasionally replenish their numbers with a drop or two of concentrated BBS taken from the swarm at the bottom of the hatchery, with a pipette. But go easy with that. A few drops from that orange swarm is a lot of shrimp. 

That is a great set up! Thank you so much for the detailed response of how to do it! Once my next hatch is ready,  this is what I am going to do! I do not have micron food but I do have some first bites, would that be okay? 

[tolstoy21]

25 minutes ago, Bekah said:

That is a great set up! Thank you so much for the detailed response of how to do it! Once my next hatch is ready,  this is what I am going to do! I do not have micron food but I do have some first bites, would that be okay? 

You want the food to be very fine and powdery. Something a teeny tiny filter feeder can handle.

I used Sera micron only because I had some laying around going unused and stale, and because it has spirulina powder in it as a main ingredient.

Spirulina powder supposedly works great for this setup from what I've read on the internet when i started researching this. I just haven't used any yet because I haven't run out of Sera micron.  A container of food goes a loooooong way.

When I feed, I dip a wooden shish-kebab skewer (something else I had laying around in my basement!) into the water a few inches. Then I dip that into the powdered food, getting a nice coating on the stick. After that, I swish the food-covered skewer around in an API test tube full of the bucket water. I then shake that up to dissolve the contents and dump the resulting green liquid into the bubbling bucket.  

Or you could just go the easy route and toss a pinch directly into the bucket!

Edited October 21, 2020 by tolstoy21

[tolstoy21]

I would like to add a thought/caveat to what I posted above about my simple brine shrimp grow out setup.

I'm not breeding a ton of fish, so I don't hatch out massive amounts of BBS. And, if I am hatching out on a daily basis, I don't dump every single last bit of left over BBS water into the grow out bucket . . . . so I do actually still rinse some down the drain. Just wanted to clarify that so there’s no confusion.

The reason for this is simply that I want to manage the population in that bucket, and I don't want to inadvertently raise the salinity if I'm not watching the evaporation vs how much salt water I'm adding on top of what's in there. 

So my leftover BBS recycling is not 100%. I reuse as much as I can within my comfort zone for managing a 3 gallon environment and dependent on how much shrimp I harvest from it and at what frequency  

Not to say that dumping every last drop of excess shrimp water wont work, it's just that I haven't played around with that as a scenario yet.

I've seen someone on YouTube who recycled every last bit and keeps his grow out bin going long term. This is his video, and what got me setting mine up.

 

Also, i have vacuumed out the bottom of my bucket, at times. and replenished with fresh salt water (basically a water change), but I'm not sure that's necessary and straining the shrimp from that change water leaves you with a dirty net full of shrimp. Admittedly, I still give that to my fish.

Rather than water change the bucket, I've settled on just harvesting the batches and starting a new one periodically. 

Edited October 22, 2020 by tolstoy21