# Other Aquarium Forums > Fish Care, Nutrition and Water Management >  How to do water change for Brine Shrimp? Do we need to feed them?

## Stitch

As above ...

How to change the water and how often for 
1) Adult Brine Shrimp
2) Baby Brine Shrimp (there are about size of a dust particle)

And do we need to feed them? If yes, with what and how often?

Thanks.

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## Stitch

Anyone can share?

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## stormhawk

Adult brine shrimp will survive in a 1 to 2 ft tank for days if you keep the water conditions to their liking. Basically marine conditions, not brackish. You can do this by using marine salt mixes with distilled water. I had decent results with Red Sea and Instant Ocean salts for hatching and keeping the shrimps alive to adulthood. Change the water about 20% per day, and you can feed them with a weak yeast solution or with Liquifry Marine. Green water cultured in marine water is also excellent food. There are also suitable products from marine LFS that are meant to feed corals and other filter feeders, which will be ingested by these brine shrimps. It is crucial not to overfeed or you will risk crashing your brine shrimp tank.

BBS hatcheries typically do not get water changes since they are harvested to feed fish once they hatch after 22-24 hours. You are recommended to thoroughly wash and air dry the hatchery containers in between hatches, because bacterial growth can be pretty insane in those hatcheries. For this reason, it is best to have 2 or 3 different hatcheries, so you can switch between them for maximum output and thus keep proper hygiene levels. Hatcheries will lose around 5 to 10% of the hatch water from evaporation if you are using the open-ended type. For this reason, it is wise to keep the hatcheries away from anything that can corrode, or will be affected by the salt sprays from the hatchery.

Say you get a large hatch from a single hatchery, only keep about half or less than that in the 1-2ft tank and use the rest to feed your fish. You will not be able to keep all of the BBS to adulthood without much larger quarters.

Adult brine shrimp can produce live young constantly if the conditions are to their liking. They start to produce eggs or cysts when they are stressed. Which explains why adult brine shrimp bagged from the LFS typically contain some "dust" at the bottom of the bag and in the water itself. Those are the resting eggs produced because the adults are stressed from being bagged in.

An alternative to brine shrimp is to raise their freshwater cousins, the fairy shrimp. You can find eggs of the fairy shrimp in a dirt + egg mix on eBay and Aquabid. These vials typically contain dirt dredged from the bottom of the ponds where the adults are cultured, so with every hatch you will find other animals too.

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## mobile2007

Change water or how to mix the salt water for brine shrimp?

Change water, shine a torch light at one corner, then use air hose to suck up the debris at the bottom. Remember to use some kind of filter ( from hardware store, plastic ) to seive out the brine shrimp. 

Salt water mix, i used those coarse salt from LFS with good result. Just dont ever use those table salt, sure die !!

Very troublesome to raise brine shrimp, just get $1 from LFS.

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## mobile2007

Oh, forgotten about the brine shrimp food. 

If you got spirulina powder, you can feed it to the brine shrimp. Better than yeast or other fish food stuff. The brine shrimp loaded with spirulina ( goodness of spirulina) will further provide color enhancing to yr fish.

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## tanmikel

sorry to dig up an old thread . marine salt can be expensive compared to just normal coarse salt purchased by the kilo at aquariums . I find 1 big soup spoon (those disposal plastic type size) per litre of water will do for hatching of brine shrimp. not only that , I can recycle that container of salt water for 2 - 3 hatchings of brine shrimp eggs . however I've not kept them to adulthood .

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## stormhawk

Marine salt, like those ready mixes from Red Sea, CaribSea etc will do. They are not exactly very expensive since you don't need much to hatch the brine shrimp and you can easily raise them to adulthood with regular water changes and feeding with appropriate food like Liquifry Marine, or any planktonic diets for filter feeders.

Do not recycle your salt water for hatching the BBS. Problem is that bacteria counts go up each time you do not rinse out or change the hatching water, so you might risk infecting your fish when you are feeding them with the newborn brine shrimp. You can read some aquaculture journals or books and they will explain the bacteria thing in detail.

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## kermit13sg

following this thread, just managed to hatch some myself, now trying to raise them to adulthood to feed fishes.

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## tanmikel

fairy shrimps is a freshwater alternative but hatch rates , at the moment , cannot fight with bbs

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## stormhawk

If you hatch the eggs in cool distilled water, you will see a better result. Treat the fairy shrimps like you would with Triops eggs and you will see a difference.

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## kermit13sg

Mine all perished... 


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## stormhawk

The BBS or adult brine shrimp perished?

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## kermit13sg

> The BBS or adult brine shrimp perished?


The babies... After hatching... I put them in salt water with aeration. Fed them flour daily, but none grew


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## stormhawk

Flour? They only start feeding after the first molt, which usually takes place several hours after hatching. Even at that stage they will need really fine foods like microalgae and such. I just feed them with Liquifry Marine when I notice they are in their 2nd stage, which is a slightly longer version than the newborn stage.

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## kermit13sg

You mean I don't have to feed them till they are adults? 


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## stormhawk

No, you feed them from their 2nd stage. There are several molting stages for the brine shrimp. The nauplii only develop mouth parts at their 2nd stage. They have no mouth parts upon hatching. You can read more at the following links:

http://www.mblaquaculture.com/conten...Production.php
http://www.angelfire.com/wa/AquariaWeb/artemia.html

The last link contains valuable information on captive culture of Artemia, with methodology tested and proven by various aquarists.

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## kermit13sg

Thanks, will read


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## SmartAlex

It's recommended to supplement their feeding with Spirulina Powder and Probiotic( Latest Effective Combination ) . I have been hatching brine shrimps in high densities and find that the combination of Spirulina and Probiotic increase survival rate and growth . 

Cheers.

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