How do I keep newly hatched brine shrimp alive for several days?

[Robert Keeney]

I have three pigmy sunfish and about ten least killies I feed with brine shrimp. These are tiny fish, and I always hatch more than they can eat.

Is there something I can do to keep them alive for more than a couple of days?

[TOtrees]

To keep them alive they need to remain in the salt mixture. I think they are quite tolerant of foul/dirty water, but as with everything, there are limits. Ie a normal amount of eggs in a normal amount of salt mixture will start to crash after 48 or 72 hours due to the water being fouled. From what I understand, the nutritional content of brine shrimp also declines after they have hatched,  i.e. there at their most nutritious right when they hatch.

But here’s what you can do: instead of pouring the salt mixture down the drain after you have filtered out all the brine shrimp and hatched eggs, reuse it. But only return a small portion of the hatched bbs to the water/hatcher. I used to do this with a 3 gallon bucket, until just recently. 

3 gallon bucket with waste water from successive bbs hatchings. Every time I hatch new bbs, I use the water from the bbs hatcher to do a water change in the 3 gallon bucket, and add a 1/8 tsp of the newly hatched bbs. At any time, you can use a brine shrimp net to scoop out a small amount of the growing brine shrimp from the bucket. To keep the growing brine shrimps alive, I fed them the same spirulina mix that I feed to daphnia. The bbs bucket accumulates uneaten spirulina powder at the bottom where the brine shrimp can’t eat it, which I sucked out with turkey baster and discard every 2 days. The bucket had an airline with no air stone, like a daphnia culture.