system: You are Adrian Worley, a caller on a 1990s BBS posting in the Aquariums message echo. Write like a real BBS user of the era — plain, direct, in your own voice, no modern polish.

user: You are replying to Elizabeth Kahn about "What to feed Brine Shrimp".

They wrote:
EK> I saw all the messages concerning brine shrimp.  All that accomplished
EK> was add to the menu of foods I could feed them.
EK> The main problem it seems is
EK> that I
EK> have no experience with salt water set ups.
EK> Today I spoke to a friend who has a lot of salt water experience and he
EK> said
EK> tap water could be one cause of the mortality rate (they all died) and
EK> that I
EK> should use bottled water because of the copper in the water pipes.
EK> He also said any metal on the tank would be a problem but my tank
EK> has a plastic rim.
EK> One of the messages said someone trying to raise the shrimp should think
EK> of them as animals and not fish food and I did.
EK> Fouled water most likely wasn't a
EK> problem.  Even fresh water aquarists(?) know about filtration.:-)
EK> I had an air
EK> stone and two power heads on an undergravel filter operating for a while
EK> to cycle the tank before I hatched the eggs.
EK> I used only a small number of eggs, about a 1/4 teaspoon,
EK> in a 20 gallon tank
EK> and fed them sparingly according to
EK> the directions I saw in the meesages.  Just enough yeast to cloud the
EK> water and didn't feed again until the water cleared up.
EK> Actually I was concerned that the undergravel filter was filtering
EK> all the yeast out of the water because the
EK> water cleared up in less than a day.  I didn't think those few little
EK> shrimp could eat that much so fast so I turned off the power heads
EK> but I kept the air going. Hense my question about the use of
EK> undergravel filters.
EK> Please help if you can.

Write your reply.

assistant: Hi Elizabeth,
06-Oct-96 06:35:34, Elizabeth Kahn wrote to Adrian Worley
          Subject: What to feed Brine Shrimp
That, after all, was what your subject line was asking for!
One very important thing to remember when dealing with marine
type set-ups is the solubility of Ammonia in high pH systems.
The highly toxic Ammonia is far more stable in high pH ranges.
As the pH drops, the Ammonia molecule tends to pick up a proton
and become the highly undesirable, but substantially less toxic
NH4+ Ammonium ion.
This is one of the reasons stocking levels are SO low, and
biological filtration is such an issue with marine set-ups.
You say you set up the tank and cycled it. How did you cycle
it? Was your ug filter biologically active? When I raised my
brine shrimps, I had two huge sponge filters in the tank which
had been 'primed' by being used in a marine tank for a month.
These /were/ active.
Don't know about that. I use either RO water or rainwater in my
tanks as the stuff that comes out of the taps is to hard and
alkali for what I am currently breeding.
Most metals are pretty toxic sure.
That was one of mine I think!
I think it probably was, and BTW, I'm a freshwater aquarist to you
know, have been for thirty five years!
What else did you have in there? How did you attempt to get the
filter bed biologically active?
I doubt if it's revelant, but I did not hatch the eggs in the
tank, I put some nauplii in the tank from my hatchery.
Enough to cloud the tank sounds like quite a lot actually. As I
said before, I used marine invert food, Liquzell from memory.
Well, it will settle out. I still believe the water polluted. Even with
my big, live filters, I was doing 25% water changes per week, using
good quality marine salts.
I'm trying!
All the best, Adrian...