artemia

[ganesan]

I have tried hatching artemia eggs with some success but separating the eggs from the live nauphili has been difficult. Today I saw an article which said that if you take a simple plastic box and separate it into two with a divider in the middle with some small gap under and say put about a quarter teaspoonful of artemia eggs in a litre of water with salt say about a table spoon and pour into one end of this plastic container, when the eggs hatch in about 24 to 72 hours with light on the other side of the divider the live nauphili will swim beneath the gap in the divider leaving all the shells and un hatched ones on the other side of the divider. He hasn't mentioned how much gap should be there separating both the ends though he mentioned you could use tapes or silicone glue to keep the divider in place. actually I had recently got about 30 numbers of juvenile sterbai, panda and albino cories and would like them to be in my discus tank once they grow a little larger and I want to feed them with live artemia. This juvenile cories are just around a cm long.Tried feeding them with powdered tetra bits but they seem to get constipated easily and I lost a few in the process. Can some one advice please.

[brewmaster15]

That really sounds like a lot of work to do...usually if you just shut the air off for a few minutes on your hatch, the empty shells float, the live BBS will swim around the hatching container, and can be collected by using a light to the containers side, (2 liter soda bottle). If you wait a few more minutes, they start to settle to the bottom and can be removed there by a piece of air line or if you fitted the bottom of the bottle with a stop-cock valve.

Conversely, you could try decapsulating the cysts which is not hard to do and hatching... or better still, those juvenile corys should take rehydrated non-hatching Decapsulated brine shrimp cysts.(just soak the nonhatching decaps for 15 mins before feeding.)

hth,
al

[ganesan]

Thanks and will try feeding them with soaked Decapsulated cyst

[Keith Perkins]

Airlines work well enough for removing bbs, but I like my turkey baster.