1. does it need to be maintained once the hatchery is set up, or can i hatch some shrimps and put the whole thing in storage for a few weeks?
2. how much does it smell?
3. is setting up a brine shrimp hatchery a good venture? it'll be food for some silver dollars and oscars.
I've always thought that baby brine shrimp were good food for newly hatched fry of discus, and some others, which are not coming to mind. I'd think brine shrimp would be too small for fish like Oscars & Silver Dollars to sustain them but it would make an excellent treat. I could be way off base here as I don't know this to be fact...:|
It won't be long before those guys get big and are craving feeder fish. So I wouldn't bother setting up anything semi-permanent to feed them from while small. A block of frozen brine shrimp is fairly cheap and all of my fish love them. You might want to consider bloodworms too, once they get a little large for the brine shrimp. I wouldn't feed that every day, I'd mix it in with dry cichlid pellets. By the time they get big enough that store-bought frozen food gets expensive, you'll probably want to move on to bigger and better food anyway.
Now if you're thinking about a tank of livebearers for feeders, that I think I could get behind.
(As an aside, my Bosemani Rainbows absolutely love defrosted brine shrimp, and go crazy when I feed them that. They are seriously unimpressed by flakes. My tetras/raspboras also thoroughly enjoy it, but don't seem to be quite the connoisseurs that my rainbows are.)
I would say get camel shrimp instead. They are very hardy, and breed quickly and easily. They also don't need much room. Do some research on them and see what you think
Those are 100% SW and are kind of hard to come by.
If your Oscar is small enough, then I would breed my own Guppies and/or Convicts. Convicts breed like crazy, and can have hundreds of fry in a month of two. But I doubt you could put it in storage. The only downfall of BBS is that they are so small.
Yeahhh...breeding brine shrimp is not worth it at all for your oscars or silver dollars. First of all, the silver dollars are mainly herbivores so they really need to be eating a veggie-based diet like a spirulina flake or pellet supplemented with fresh veggies. Oscars will certainly eat brine shrimp, but considering my 5" Jack Dempsey can annihilate a cube of frozen brine shrimp in a matter of seconds, you'd have to commit brine shrimp genocide in order to even make a light snack for a full grown oscar.
If you want to feed live feeders, just get something like a 29g and stuff it full of platies. They're pretty, they're entertaining, and they breed like crazy.
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Related Threads
?
?
?
?
?
Tropical Fish Keeping
597.8K posts
83.7K members
Since 2006
forum community dedicated to tropical fish owners and enthusiasts. Come join the discussion about species,breeding, health, behavior, aquariums, adopting, care, classifieds, and more! Open to fish, plants and reptiles living in freshwater or saltwater environments.