Low hatch rate or poor hatchery? BBS question

[Alistriwen]

Hi all,

I recently purchased a San Fransisco brand Brine shrimp hatchery. It's the little black box with the collection cup that looks like a urine cup lol. It came with three packages of salt/bbs eggs. We put it in and quite a few hatched but more than half did not. We weren't sure if this was just due to the poor quality of the eggs or if it was because of the lack of aeration? We poured the remaining eggs/water into the 2 l bottle setup we had made previously to circulate the eggs with an air pump and see if any more hatch by tomorrow. Any ideas?

 

[bigspizz]

Buy another one and if you get the same results.....Try again?

 

[Alistriwen]

We actually bought two lol. We wanted to test one first. We have some 80% hatch rate eggs coming in soon and we will put them to the test in the hatchery and see how that goes. Ive had the eggs in the aerated setup for quite a few hours now and I dont think anything is hatching so Im betting the eggs are just poor quality.

 

[bigspizz]

That or the water I have never had sea monkies..*caugh....I mean I have never hatched brines and maybe the WQ is important...

 

[Alistriwen]

Could be. This "hatchery/shrimpery" also doubles as an educational kit for kids in which case they would be sea monkeys . It's a really simple system that makes it super easy to collect and feed the brine shrimp though, much easier than the 2L bottle set up and only cost us $15 with tax and it included 3 packs of salt/eggs.

 

[Alistriwen]

As it turns out, when the eggs were thrown into the 2l hatchery with the aeration many more hatched. We are going to aerate the little boxes now with a cheap weak pump in the hopes that we'll get more out of our eggs.

 

[jloos1988]

ya they need good areation and im pretty sure they like water movement...i have the same thing and i have the kind u hang onto a fish tank...both with not good results, theyre onlydesigned to hatch the eggs not grow. so theyre only good if youre feeding fry and in that case theyre awesome fry food

 

[Alistriwen]

We are only trying to use it for fry food but we got a much greater hatch rate with aeration so we're just going to stick some piping in and run a gentle pump in the box. That way we still get the easy collection method and also tons of hatched shrimp.