Brine Shrimp Hatchery

So today was just pouring like crazy and we had some thunder and lighting.. Our lights started flickering a bit too but once in awhile the rain will stop and the sun will shine through. Weird bipolar weather..
But anyways we had a little mini brine shrimp hatchery with a small bottle because it was the only one we could find on such short notice. I did say in my last post that the Archer Farms electrolyte-infused water was the best water bottle to use for your own diy brine shrimp hatchery.

You can click on the picture above but I drew a line of where you should cut the bottle. If you have this same bottle, you cut on the second ridge.

You should get two sections (the bottom half and the top half) and you just insert the top half upside down in to the bottom half and it should "click" or interlock with each other because the top half has another ridge. This is why I love this bottle. 

Now you also need to get an air pump and some airline tubing. You can easily get some off of ebay/amazon, petsmart/petco, or a local fish store.  You want to make sure the end that goes into the bottle reaches all the way to the bottle cap for maximum tumbling of the bring shrimp eggs. When you make the mixture, put in some warm water, some salt and brine shrimp eggs. We also place this bottle in a bigger "bucket" with heated water because we find that they hatch much faster in heated water. Therefore, if you're putting this diy brine shrimp hatchery in another bucket like we did, you want to cut some holes in the bottom like we did here.

This allows the bottle to go into the bucket of water without floating and toppling over. Think of it like a boat on water. If the boat has no holes, it won't sink. In this case we do need it to "sink" so it stays stable. 

Now here are some updates on our babies!

This one was taken 2 days ago.

This was taken today. Look how big they've already gotten and they're only a week old! In this picture, he's looking at a brine shrimp to eat! :)

Thank you for reading! :)

You can follow me on instagram: @jwk92 

Our Killifish babies are growing!

We decided to take the rock tunnel out of the tank because Aaron thought it prevented the circulation of water from flowing freely which prevents dirt and old food getting sucked up by the filter. All the babies were also hiding between the rocks of the tunnel and we could never see them so for now, we took out the tunnel. I made Aaron compromise and get Java Fern because we've had great success with them and I wanted them to have at least some hiding spaces. While we took out the rock tunnel, we were still only able to see only a couple and they move really fast but we were able to take a picture of one of them!

This is our java fern from Petsmart. It cost $7.99 I think... They just got a shipment of them yesterday so we got a nice big one! The babies are all hiding in the java fern so I couldn't find any of them to take a pic of. :(

I found another egg that is ready to hatch! You can tell because you can see it's eyes. There was another one but I couldn't really take a good pic of it..

We are hatching our own brine shrimp to feed them and made our own bs (brine shrimp) hatchery! We used bottles (soda bottles, water bottles, etc) but we could only find a small one on such short notice. Our favorite bottle (well at least mine) is the Archer Farms electrolyte infused water bottle. I believe they only sell these at Target since it is a Target brand.

It is very tall as you can see and it is a decent width. Next time, I'll write up a post on how to make your own bs hatchery. It's very simple and easy to do. The reason you need bottles or at least something with a cone shaped edge is because you need to be able to push air throughout the bottle and with a flat bottom, the bs eggs won't tumble around the bottle evenly. The reason I like this bottle is because I feel everything fits and connects perfectly. I'll get into all the details next time though. ^^

You can follow me on instagram: @jwk92

Thank youuu!