Brine Shrimp

Just hatched my first batch of brine shrimp. I really didn't think anything hatched but after turning off the air and watching VERY closely there is life!

Does anyone feed their fish brine and if so what do you feed the brine to gut load them?

 

Newly hatched brine shrimp (nauplii) are most nutritious immediately upon hatching. The longer after hatching, the more the food sack is consumed, the lower the food value.
As the brine progress through the molts (approximately 15), they lose a lot of the fatty acid content, but as that content lowers, the protein level increases so that juveniles and adults grown from GSL cysts will have protein levels in the high 50% levels. (dry weight %)
They cannot be gut loaded for about 24 hours after hatching when the do their first molt to the second instar stage and develop a mouth and anus.
Brine shrimp will ingest anything that is appropriately sized and remain in suspension, so you can chose what kind of nutrition you wish them to be for your fish be it vitamins, protein, or fatty acid.
Fish will normally eat brine shrimp that are appropriately sized for the fish. Smallest fish will eat newborn and probably up to adults, whereas large fish won't be bothered with the newborn brine.
For gut loading, newborn take approximately 24 hours to fully gut load, and it's best done in two 12 hours stages using new water and food for the second stage.
As the brine grow, the time to gut load decreases to the point adults will gut load in approximately 1 1/2 hours.
Brine shrimp cysts should be stored in a refrigerator.
Ideally, the cysts can be decapped using bleach, improving hatchout rates and eliminating problems of bacteria which cysts are known to harbour, and also eliminating the problem of blocked digestive tracts which occasionally occur upon ingesting an unhatched or hatched cyst shell.

 

You want to feed them photoplankton about 5-8 hours before harvesting them - that's "gut loading"

Hold on, I have a site saved somewhere....ah, here it is: How to Harvest and Feed Baby Brine Shrimp to Your Tank by Marc Levenson - Reefkeeping.com

 

While brine can be gut loaded with phyto, unless it is something other than nanno, it won't have a great deal of value.
It will have even less value for a 5 to 8 hour time period mentioned as nauplii cannot fully gut load in that time period.
(Information is from the Artemia Reference Center at the University of Ghent and can be found contained in an article for Live foods for aquaculture on a site provided for the United Nations)
CLICK HERE AND SCROLL DOWN TO SECTION 4.0, ARTEMIA

 

Wow thats an amazing link, thanks for sharing

 

Just a thought for those of you feeding BBS to your tanks for purposes other than feeding fish, you would be much better off using the smaller rotifer.
Rotifers grow so fast you can harvest some daily, and, they can be gut loaded in about an hour or so. Being much smaller, rotifers will be fed on by more corals and other micro life of your tanks than BBS will.