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mjreefs
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ichthyogeek said:
So in order to gut load brine shrimp, you have to get the brine shrimp nauplii to develop mouths. Adding vitamins/selcon might be enough, but it tends to coat the brine shrimp as opposed to them ingesting the vitamins/selcon in question.
So what you can do, is hatch the brine shrimp eggs for 2-3 days. Preferably, you'd bleach the eggs first to get rid of all the nasty gunk and bacteria that thrive on brine shrimp cysts off. After the eggs have hatched and the nauplii have developed mouths (48-72 hours after you put the dry cysts in water), you can add something like phytoplankton, spirulina powder, or yeast (not recommended) to the water. 2-4 hours after that, the brine shrimp will have ingested the phyto/spirulina, and you'll have gut loaded brine shrimp.
It's important to make sure that you have live brine shrimp after hatching for 2-3 days. What I do, is I hatch them for 24 hours, filter off the hatched cysts (the top layer), and stick the unhatched cysts and the brine shrimp into another container like a 2L bottle or plastic bucket. I then slowly aerate the water (as slow of an aeration as possible), and after another 24 hours, I add in the gut loading food.
ichthyogeek said:
As for freezing them, it might work, it might not. Freezing water and flesh tends to lyse cells at the temperatures that normal freezers use, since the freezing (and therefore water crystallization) process is so slow. You can try it, but be warned about it beforehand.
A potentially better way (I haven't tested it yet) would be to take dry ice, and freeze the brine shrimp that way. Get a small styrofoam box, fill it with dry ice, and a flat surface (like a cutting board or piece of cardboard), and when the brine shrimp are ready, stick them in a ziploc bag and put it on the flat surface, and hopefully they'll freeze a lot quicker than in a home freezer.
Also, you're going to have to get high densities of brine shrimp in order to achieve a level similar to commercial products. Keep that in mind as well.
Ok, so I probably wouldn't freeze them given that it might just lose the benefit of it. There's a local company here who sells liquid coral food that is composed of chlorella, spirulina, and phytoplankton, would that work in gut loading the brine shrimp? Also, if I have to use decapsulated brine shrimp eggs, how long before can I start gut loading them?
YumaMan said:
Here's how I gut-load my BBS. First, buy decapsulated eggs (E-Z Egg is the name of the product). These eggs do not leave husks after hatching and so the water is much cleaner. My eggs hatch after 18 hours. At that point the BBS have their egg sacs and so offer good nutrition to your fish and corals. After 8 hours they begin to feed through their mouths, so that you can begin to gut load them. I use a blend of four marine microalgaes called Tahiti Blend from BrineShrimpDirect.com. After another 4 hours they may be harvested with the algae gut-loaded; now they offer good protein value, but you can further improve their nutritional value by adding 1/4 tsp of Selco to their water, adding important lipids to the BBS for faster growth to fish larvae and corals. The Selco is not ingested by the BBS but rather coats their bodies with the sticky lipids. BBS loaded in this way is highly nutritious. This has been my preferred feed for about 8 years.
Sadly, I don't live in the US, but I think I can source the decapsulated eggs locally, hopefully, they are of good quality.
Stupid question, can I use my tank's water to hatch decapsulated brine shrimp eggs?
