So w/ me being who I am, just obsessed, I have been trying to find better feeding methods for my tanks. Live food being the obvious choice. I have phyto, and rotifers, and brine. My DIY question is this. What do I feed the brine? I am looking for a diy recipe that will give the livestock the brine are being fed too, the proper nutrition. Keeping brine a live isn't that hard, gut loading them seems to have many possibilities.
Generally you want to feed the brine shrimp as close to when they hatch for maximum nutrition. Essentially, their nutritional value is never higher than it is when they still have their yolk sack. Also their shells are softer when they are newly hatched.
That being said i've only fed brine shrimp to freshwater fish. So how my knowledge of them applies to salt idk.
Brine shrimp are filter feeders, so you could culture inforsia (green water) to feed to them. Put some aquatic plants in water on a windowsill or under some full spectrum lighting and that will create the microscopic inforsias.
IMHO brine shrimp live or frozen gives very little neutrinall value to fish or coral in the saltwater hobby at least. You would see much better results feeding mysis and chopped sea food. I personally make my own frozen food which contains zooplankton,mysis,squid,clam chunks,rotifers,fish eggs,oyster feast ,rods food,nori and coral extacy. I use very little phyto plankton. Just throw it all in a blender and pour it into ice cube trays. Thaw it out and watch everything go nuts ! Just my .02 tho.
IMHO brine shrimp live or frozen gives very little neutrinall value to fish or coral in the saltwater hobby at least. You would see much better results feeding mysis and chopped sea food. I personally make my own frozen food which contains zooplankton,mysis,squid,clam chunks,rotifers,fish eggs,oyster feast ,rods food,nori and coral extacy. I use very little phyto plankton. Just throw it all in a blender and pour it into ice cube trays. Thaw it out and watch everything go nuts ! Just my .02 tho.
I know the nutritional value sucks for the most part, they are in fact only nutritiousness when they still have the yolk, or I have heard a lot of people gut loading them.
Rotifers and mysis will also be added to the menu.
I also make my own fishy food, though not exactly the same recipe.
Enriching newly hatched brine is futile because they don't eat for the first 24 hours. If you want to raise them longer, use brewers yeast or concentrated phytoplankton for growout. Once they're feeding, and prior to feeding them to your tank/fish, enrich with tetraselmis and/or nannochloropsis and/or selco.
Brine shrimp are like pork rinds. They're not very nutritious by themselves, but if you get something nutritious into them they're much better and will actually do some good. Sorry if I offended any pork rind lovers out there.