Q&A for How to Raise Brine Shrimp

You can buy decapsulated brine shrimp that will branch from eggs. That will reduce the hatching time down to a few hours instead of a few days.

Keep their salinity within the proper range. I think you can go with a variety of ranges. What works really well is you put a stopper at the bottom of 2 liter bottle. Then, put an aerator in there and stand it up. You don't even need a diffuser at the bottom. Fill it with water. Keep it a little warmer than room temperature, and feed them.

You can feed them spirulina powder for sure. They may be able to eat yeast as well, but I'd check on that elsewhere first. Spirulina powder will always be a safe bet, though.

You feed them right after they finish their yolk sac, which is about 24 hours after hatching.

No. It just needs to be free of chlorine/chloramine and other toxins. Conditioned tap water will be fine in most places. If it works for your fish, it will work for brine shrimp.

Get the yolk from a hard boiled egg and mash it into a crumbly powder. Put a pinch in the water to feed your shrimp.

In their first stage of development, brine shrimp nauplii do not feed, but consume their own energy reserves stored in the cyst. Wild brine shrimp eat microscopic planktonic algae. Cultured brine shrimp can also be fed particulate foods including yeast, wheat flour, soybean powder or egg yolk.

Boil it first so that the egg is hard, crumble the yolk, and feed small bits and pieces.

It is possible to keep them as pets. It just takes it little work cleaning the tank.

All shrimp are both male and female, the shrimp will either lay eggs or hatch them in an egg sac behind its legs. There aren't any special things to trigger this you just have to slightly increase the water temperature.

Aquarium or marine salt is used for aquariums, obviously -- you can't use normal table salt as a substitute for these salts because table salt contains chemicals that are harmful to all kinds of aquatic species.

If the shrimp are adults, you can harvest them with a simple net used to scoop aquarium fish.

Mix 1 tablespoon of salt per liter of water. Make sure that the salt does not contain iodine. Most table salt has added iodine, so check first. Rock salt, sea salt, Himalayan salt, ice cream salt are usually fine.

No, do not feed dead or unhealthy shrimp to fish. They could be dangerous or even fatal to your fish.

Yes, you can.

You can use a small bowl instead of a tank, and not buy heaters, filters or other accessories.

Brine shrimp are just over a centimeter in size. While they aren't poisonous, there is no reason to cook them since they're so small as to provide no nutritional benefit without consuming excessively large numbers of them. They really only support smaller creatures like small fish and frogs, etc.

Brine shrimp should do well in water with salt that is somewhere within 25 ppm. I do not measure this, but I specifically add about two tablespoons of salt for every 16.9 ounces.

You can feed brine shrimp to turtles that are small enough to eat them, but make sure you are gut loading them soon after hatching (24 hours or less), as they quickly lose most of their nutritional value.

Most likely; they need dissolved oxygen in order to breathe and thrive. A bubbler disturbs the water and lets oxygen into the water.

Yes. A small jar works perfectly fine if you just want to experiment. But if you plan to raise them to feed your fish (live fish food is preferred for some species of fish), you will need a larger container.

It is natural for a lot of the young ones to die before adulthood (this might take many weeks). Then the adults will lay eggs and the population will grow again.

Yes, it is a good food for brine shrimp. Do not add too much though, or else the water will stink.

The biggest they can get is about 1 cm in length. Most of them don't get this big, though, the average size of the adults is around 0.5 cm. It can take many weeks to reach this size, though.

Have a schedule. A good idea would be to put about 1/4 of a packet in every three days. Brine shrimp grow to adult size in 8 days, so you would have a new bunch of brine shrimp every other day or so (taking into account the brine shrimp breeding).

It usually takes a few days for any shrimp to breed, but there's nothing you need to do to start the process.

Yes, you may feed brine shrimps to hermit crabs.

You would have to work with it a bit, filter it and such, but if it kept other shrimp alive then it should be fine. Just give the sponge filter time to clean the water before you add shrimp to it.

No, you need both.

Nope. As long as you don't dump salty water in with the shrimp, your fish will be fine.