Brine Shrimp Direct offers a wide range of frozen fish food in convenient cube trays and flat packs. Delivered right to your door! Nutritious pre-formed gelatin-based diets in frozen bar, cube and extruded form for the large display aquarium, Amazonian exhibits, tank-busters and large saltwater specimens.
The benefits of feeding live artemia are well known and accepted in the aquarium community. Alternatively, there are many convenient and well-formulated artificial, inert diets that purport to completely eliminate the need for such live food. These prepared diets and, more importantly, the specific amino acids, lipids, and vitamins they contain are, if not complete replacements for live feed, often necessary additions to a single species diet lacking in one or more of the essential nutrients.
That having been said, seldom does a soggy, inanimate particle of gelatinized starch and dried fishmeal ignite the feeding response in fish like the herky-jerky swimming antics of a live brine shrimp. For this reason, live brine shrimp will always be an integral part of the solution for sustaining healthy aquarium populations. In addition to moving about the water column, live brine shrimp have a number of other useful traits, namely:.
Yet, raising brine shrimp to maturity in useful numbers is not an easy task; and you can expect to spend as much time at it, if not more, as you would breeding and caring for baby fish β often with less-than-hoped for results. The following primer is designed to help obviate the need to commit the most frequent mistakes β most often, the mistakes of overstocking, overfeeding, underfeeding, inadequate aeration, under-filtration, and providing inappropriate feeds.
Given the myriad ways to inadvertently kill these critters, even in a comfortable, controlled environment, it seems counter-intuitive, if not downright discouraging to the aquarist, that an animal of prehistoric pedigree can, in its natural setting, be left high and dry in the summer, desiccated for months under the hot sun, forcibly removed to a faraway clime in the gut of an avian migrant, re-deposited in a hyper-saline lake devoid of life, and subjected to subfreezing temperatures, only to emerge from its capsule to thrive again and even propagate.
