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Growing brineshrimp past the bbs stage


chorrylan

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hi,

I was wondering how many people grow brineshrimp past the freshly-hatched-baby stage; how successful it is; how to do it; how much effort (and smell) is involved etc?

I feed a reasonable amount of bbs to my fish and was contemplating growing some up but don't quite know how to start.

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Laurie -

What I have read suggests this needs to be done in large volume ponds. Not worth the trouble IMHO - there are easier foods to culture wink.gif

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Hi Laurie, I have never grown the bbs to adult but have tried without success.

Though not easy, newly hatched baby brine shrimp

can be reared to adults in ± 3 weeks. this it the title of this web site.

http://www.sfbb.com/technical_info/Growingbrineshrimp.htm

And for Alex. Microworms...... http://scp.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic...0&hl=microworms

From time-to-time, aquarium hobbyists debate the nutritional value of microworms. Jokes are frequently made that the nutritional value of microworms increases with the increase of the price of brine shrimp cysts.

Other literature, while providing nutritional content information about microworms (48% protein, 21% lipids, 7% glycogen, 1% organic acids, and 1% nucleic acids) 4, do not support the information with references. In a paper for the Journal of World Aquaculture Society, Ricci, Fifi, Ragni, Schlechtriem and Focken state, “The nutritional value of P. redivivus is high and comparable to that of Artemia.”

While there will perhaps always be some debate on the nutritional values and qualities of this particular nematode, there is little negative evidence to support a negative position and numerous observations and data to the contrary.

The nutritional quality of nematodes can be enhanced by the use of media enrichment or a bio-encapsulation technique. Enrichment is simply carried out by adding a fortification additive (vitamin premix for example) to the culture medium (referred to as direct enrichment).

Taken from this website that has lots of good info on diffrent live foods

http://www.livefoodcultures.com/microworms.html

HTH

Ed. wink.gif

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Laurie - in a spare tank - you will need a heater, an aerator, sufficient salt, and add bakers yeast to feed them. I used to grow artemia out at uni. You can even buy booster supliments to feed them. Baby brine shrimp develop digestive tracts after about 30 hours post hatch, and thus can be boosted as soon as they start feeding. (so they have a higher nutritional quality for the fish eating them). From memory we used Selco, or super selco? I dont recall. Yeast seems to work fairly well though.

If it gets too scungy or anaerobic in the tank - they will die. Jems used to grow out artemia

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thanks people.

I think I might be sticking to bbs.. the bit in the article about mixing up chook poop and feeding it to the shrimp 6 or 8 times a day would be about enough to get me disowned by my kids.

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Hi Laurie,

I have done this in an outside container feeding them yeast. The colony is self perpetuating and does not require much work. As the water clears you need to provide more food, generally I use yeast as this is easiest.

The down side is that production is poor and variable, as with many cultures. It is certainly influenced by temperature. The brine shrimp when healthy and well fed don't produce cysts but live young. You need to collect these and seperate them from the adults (breeding stock).

It is an interesting exercise, but not sufficiently reliable in my opinion to be the main source of fry food. Handy supplement perhaps.

Cheers

Brett

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Hi -

On the easier note:

Considered easy: mosquito larvae, white worms, grindal worms, daphnia

More challenging: blackworms and blood worms can allegedly be cultured.

HTH -

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