Hatching Brine Shrimp (Artemia)

Customers often ask me about my Brine Shrimp hatching when picking up fish so I thought I would explain the method I use and hopefully this will be helpful for many people. For one I am a big fan of Aquarium Coop and the base of this recipe & procedure comes from Dean’s method at Aquarium Coop.

Ok first thing you need is a brine shrimp hatchery, If you want to purchase one then currently the best one on the market is the Ziss Blender and even with its little flaws it is a very good quality and useful hatcher. I do use the Ziss Blender, but you can still have very good success using an other hatcher or even using the water bottle DIY method.

The most recent change I did was to not use an air stone and instead just use a modified solid air tube that reaches further down to the bottom. This modification creates larger bubbles and effectively stirs up the bottom much better. You want everything mixing up consistently but not too hard.

I now soak my eggs overnight before starting the hatcher, I am getting much better hatch rate, almost no unhatched eggs. But you can start it up right away and let it run for 36h if you want.

The first step is to add tap water, baking soda and salt. Then I add brine shrimp eggs and let them soak as specified above. I do this preparation before 9PM.

The following morning around 7h30 I start the bubbles and run my hatchery for a 24h until the next morning. During this time I leave the light off at night and on during the whole day, im not sure if this makes a difference but this is what i do and its working.

On the morning the hatch is ready I stop the air and turn on a small light aimed at the bottom valve/spout. Brine Shrimp are drawn to light, so most of them will converge to the bottom. I wait about 15 min as to let all the hatched eggs float to the top.

When I am ready to harvest I open the valve and empty half of the batch into a container, I use a 1L plastic pickle container. Then i just go around with my dippy siphon and feed each tank two turns. And keep the rest for later. I do this throughout the day, at one point I add the rest of the brine shrimp to my container.

That’s it! Recipe below.

Recipe

1 Litre of tap water

1/8 tsp of baking soda (brings up PH)

1 TSP of eggs, you could do 1.5 TSP. Try it and see. I only need 1TSP.

2 TBSP of coarse Aquarium Salt

Where can you buy the Ziss Blender?

In Canada you can get online from these 2 fine shops, they are my goto places.

https://www.aquariumdirect.ca/ (Quebec)

https://angelfins.ca/ (Ontario)

 

Where can you buy good quality Brine Shrimp Eggs?

Contact me for details, I can sell you 50,75 and 100 gr