Starting a brine shrimp culture

[Millerman]

I was considering starting a brine shrimp culture to raise adult shrimp to feed to my fish as a snack. Could I do this in just a 5 gallon bucket and would the adult shrimp be able to repopulate with out any special care? and do brine shrimp live in salt water? I'm open to suggestion and if any one has experience culturing other species that are easier please give input.

Im not sure if I posted this in the right section

 

[jetajockey]

There's a video series that Dave Ramsey did on youtube where he shows how he raises his to adulthood using some tubs outdoors. I did this once with a 5 gallon bucket and it worked pretty well, although I was dumping water change water in there from a SW tank at the time.

I tried to recreate it again just by dumping old brine shrimp cultures in the container but it didn't work out the same.

 

[Millerman]

I've never done anything like this before but I thought it would be cool to feed my fish some live food everyone in a while if it's not to much maintenance, I'm considering maybe trying daphnia as they don't need salt.

 

[jetajockey]

I mess with different live foods and the easiest one I have come across that is somewhat substantial to community sized fish is grindal worms.

Daphnia are nice if you can keep a green water culture going. I had a few cultures going outside earlier this year but they crashed when the weather got cold

 

[Millerman]

Where would you buy these?

 

[jetajockey]

I can send you a starter culture for 7.50 if you are in the US. Alternatively you could go to ebay and find them. I believe that they also occur in compost piles.

 

[Millerman]

It's going to be below freezing for quite some time where I live, I was more just curious about what live food you can grow for fish. When it warms up I'll pm you if I decide to culture the grindal worms. I'm considering just harvesting some mosquito larva in the summer instead now as this sounds very simple.

 

[jetajockey]

Harvesting mosquito larvae is a great option, just remember to harvest them regularly for obvious reasons.

The grindal worm (white worm cultures as well) are done indoors in a plastic shoebox. That's one thing that makes them a lot easier to deal with. There's plenty of writeups on the basics for them.

 

[Millerman]

Has anyone heard of culturing pond snails? Or any other pest snail, then just smashing or plucking them out of there shell before feeding them?

 

[BillD]

Crushing snails is one way of controlling their numbers while at the same time feeding the fish.