Harvesting Artemia

I was just wondering how people that were growing brine shrimp, how they harvest the artemia. Do you wait a certain period once they hatch to feed them to the fish, do you supplement them and if so how you do it?
I am getting the whole process perfected before I set up my seahorse tank, and am 36 hours into hatching baby brine shrimp. I have a bizzilion of them in my dish, but was wondering if anybody had any hints on how to make this process the smoothest.
I did just rinse a whole bunch off with water and then placed them into my big tank and the fish seemed to enjoy this little treat, but again, not sure if I waited long enough or what.

 

Brine shrimp once hatched are only of any nutritional value for about 4 hours after hatching,
after that you have to enrich them with and enrichment formula like SELCO

Brine Shrimp Direct has allot of information on how to hatch, enrich and raise Brine shrimp.
They also have anything you need to raise them, nets, food, enrichments.

I was raising them out side in a plastic sweater box up until a couple of days ago.
Got quite a few adults that i was feeding to my tanks. Found out that as they
reach adulthood they can eat you out of house and home!



The 2 ltr bottles contain the phyto cultures that I was using to feed them. unfortunately
I could not keep up with the demand for food at this time to raise them to full adulthood.

I am going to try it again before the end of summer here only this time I have 2 5 gallon
buckets of phyto growing.

 

There's no such thing as waiting too long. If you wait too long, the shrimp are no longer nauplii.....basically nothing but empty calories. If you delay, you have to enrich them because their growing cycle uses the nutrients that you want for your fish.

EDIT: Great post Gazog....Karma to you

 

I feed mine to my freshwater tanks within hours of them hatching. I am trying to perfect hatching just enough to feed them for a day, but not enough to have a lot fo waste. I'm also looking into an automatic hatchery/feeder for the FW tank. If I don't keep the rainbow shark well fed he goes after his tank mates and it's a bit much to feed him artemia (he likes live food) three times a day on top of everything else.

 

one of the LFS just got in those automatic feeder/hatchery kits..I am seriuosly thinking about dumping the hatchery that I have now and going to that when I set up the new tank.
The problem I am having now is the design of the system I am using...It is suppossed to have the babies go into this basket because of the light...well they all swim to the center, but not into the basket that is there...they go under it, they go around it...so I have to suck them out with a turkey baster and with it I suck up the shells, the unhatched eggs and all the other crap.

I guess the other question i have is the supplementation. I bought Super Selcon or whatever and the directions says to place them in another container place this stuff in there and have keep the water arreated (my mind completely shut down on how to spell that word), I am unable to dial down my air stone enough so that it does not make Baby Brine Shrimp smoothies...last time I bought live brine I killed them all trying to keep air in there...

 

Cut the airline tubing. Then take the air valve off of your acclimation drip line and put it in between the two sides of tubes. (It's actually made by Lee's for controlling airflow.....we just adapted the valves for drip lines). Have Nick or Joe or someone give you another one so you don't have to keep moving the valve back and forth.......they have hundreds of them.