been sold for years. And they are a lot easier to raise than the Instant Fish kits (featuring annual killifish eggs) that seem to come around every 15-20 years. And all of those are easier than the Triops kits where if they hatch you get one big, still hungry cannibalistic Triops. ;)
I would guess that unit per unit, the brine shrimp are cheaper than as sea monkeys. While I had luck with small portions of bs eggs in shops, I haven't more recently.
You will not need to hatch very many eggs a day in order to feed a few fry. (In fact I used to rinse a portion of adult bs and then take the bbs out of the rinse water.)
As a kid, I bought a little vial of b.s. eggs at a pet shop and wonder of wonders they hatched! I used a big shallow (2") baking pan of my Mom's before I knew about soap in dishes. In fact I used table salt without having heard about its drawbacks. I also hadn't heard about brine shrimp nets (many of those available on today's market aren't tight enough a weave) or sieves. Lastly I hasn't hear of food for bs and they starved after a few days.
I've often wondered if spirulina powder, from a health food store, would feed them.
If your shop sells "tin" cans of sealed bs eggs those will be good. The best way to destroy the ability of bs eggs to hatch is humidity. Marine salts, water softener salt, the inexpensive cattle feed salt from agricultural supply stores, are all good sources of salt for a solution. A cheap hydrometer. thermometer combination is sold through LFS stores. Those are cheaper than lab and cooking (beer brewing) hydrometers, I think.
16 level tablespoons of a granular salt (such as the feed salt or canning salt) to a gallon of water will roughly reproduce sea salt. The salt with the larger crystals leave me uncertain. I got to the point where I could just pour a certain amount of feed salt into a gallon jar and it was good to go.
1.020 or 1.022 is a fine reading for bs if you use a hydrometer. They can go all the way up to a specific gravity of 1.050 (The Great Salt Lake) but the popular wisdom is that the bs live longer at a lower specific gravity. A batch should hatch out a 80F in a day. Lower temperatures may take 2 days.
Mixing with chlorinated water doesn't hurt and may kill bacteria on the outside of the shells/cysts. I use a length of hard airline tubing for aeration and two 1-gallon wide mouthed pickle jars, alternating the days I start a hatch.
The hatching water can be reused but must be clean. If it smells or is discolored, mix a new batch up.
It is best to feed bbs within a couple of hours of hatching. They are smaller then. Also, they aren't even born with functional mouth parts and live off of the nutrients in their yoke sake. By 24 hours and two molts or instars they don't have as many nutritional goodies in them as at hour 3.
A pretty good site, as a source of things brine shrimp and as a source of information is www.brineshrimpdirect.com
I've ordered from them a couple of times and have been pleased with what I got.
When our son was quite young, he enjoyed helping harvest Daphnia (a freshwater crustacean with a similar life style to bs). He had his drum bowl of Daphnia which we fed green water to each night. I explained that if we didn't take some out each evening, the culture would crash of overpopulation and all of the Daphnia might die. They remained pets for that summer. With his permission, I pulled some for feeding the fish - after the kids went to bed. It worked pretty well.
Raising brine shrimp to adulthood is a lot harder than raising Daphnia. It can be done, but I prefer the Daphnia, lack of "salt creep," greater productivity of fresh water and the fact that Daphnia can swim and forage in a fish tank for days or even months until eaten. And they reproduce there too, providing baby Daphnia for baby guppies. Brine shrimp are good for a few hours in fresh water and the live ones in shops are pretty starved and of less food value.
Both species, in "good times" produce females which in turn produces hundreds and thousands of live young parthenogenically - without sexual reproduction. When their pond or lake's conditions become oxygen or food poor, too hot or too cold, the females parthenogenically produce resting eggs or cysts.
A few years ago the El Nino winds brought so much rainwater to the Great Salt Lake Basin that the lake remained less salty than before, the brine shrimp were more comfortable and the commercial brine shrimp egg crop was way down. It is funny to think that egg production is a response to discomfort.
Explaining that the critters are fish food is a bit of a challenge when talking to kids and non-fish people. It is wise to do so however.
We had some friends over for pinochle several years ago. I was running behind in feeding off some live brine shrimp (this was BD or Before Daphnia). I invited my friend Ray to join me in the fishroom as I scurried from tank to tank with a turkey baster, squirting in (hopefully) the right amount of shrimp for each tank population.
Our of the corner of my eye I saw Ray's eyes kind of bug out and he staggered back from the aquarium he had been so closely watching. Alarmed and worrying about a heart attack, I rushed to ask him if he was ok.
He explained that he was ok. but emotionally a little kicked around. He had focused in on one particular brine shrimp and had become quite enchanted with it. All of a sudden a killifish cruised into his vision and sucked the brine shrimp down the hatch! He was rather shaken by the brevity of some creature's lives!
All the best!
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