Artemia Methods

Hello! Now I want to post here, not in the thread “living food for Paros”, because here is the subject just Artemia Methods:

with the sieves I came now to a success: I have got (falsely) a round sieve with 0,150 mm, (I had ordered 0,200).
I got at least also the 0,200 and now I am ready to sieve with very good success Sanders premium naupliae from the eggs from JBL Artemio:

With the first sieving and a bit washing with tap water I get through the 0,200 into the 0,150 fine small naupliae for baby fish.

If I wash then the rest a little bit stronger, the rest of the naupliae fall through the sieve and really :cheer: the eggs stay on the 0,200 mm sieve!

So I am sure to get my amount of naupliaes without danger for the fish! :silly: 😆 B)

Thank you all for your good advices!

Last not least update:

one day I will try Arnos tanks!

Now I use since quite some time Artemio and the four sieves: 0,240 mm, 0,200mm, 0,150mm and 0,100mm.

The best results I find when I empty the Artemio after about 24 hours.
Then the sieve method works quite well.

When I wait 36 hours, the naupliae begin to grow as large as the eggs and are difficult to be separated with the sieves.

After several sieving passes in the 0,100 mm sieve are found sometimes very small naupliae. Astonishing is that during the first sieve pass I find in the 0,100 mm sieve eggs or parts of eggs.

So my sieving method isn’t ideal, but works quite good.
And I guess, because not many people are looking at the naupliae with magnifying glass, generations of Paros have survived with getting also athemia eggs as food….

Exactly, Deepin’ peat hits the point. There are no eggs, but cysts, and the cystshells are not dangerous for Paros even if occasionally swallowed (that maybe different with other fish). They are contrary to beautiful for us, insofar we try to avoid it.

The nutritional value of Artemia naupliae vanishes rather rapidly after hatching. It is best immediately after hatching, and nearly to nothing after three days without being fed. This does not mean that “old naupliae” should not be fed to the fishes, but we should be conscious of that. We can bring female licorice gouramies to fertility with fresh Artemia but not with unboostered old naupliae.

Dorothee, I did not say that you should feed them all at once but that you should be conscious of what you do. It is quite rational to feed older naupliae, too, but one should be conscious about their status: they lost most of their nutritional value. But they maybe useful as food nevertheless now and then, because there is no constant high nutritional value in natural food either. Sometimes, fish eat food for other aims as to grow or to become fertile or fat: e.g. simply for staying alive and be no longer hungry, young and adults. Young need more nutritional value than adults, of course, and this matches happily with freshly hatched Artemia. But it is equally wrong to feed our aquarium fish food of high-percentage nutritional value exclusively.

That is one of the reasons why live food is much better than the industrial food we have today. It has a good mixture of all which a fish needs without producing too much waste in the end. Industrial food has a constant composition of ingredients, including components of highly concentrated nutritional value, and this is unnatural. Every community tank fed on industrial food only has quite a problem with germs and waste, the smaller the more. And its fish tend to become too fat. We have this problem much less, a great advantage.

I think, what you do is quite all right. Probably you change: beginning with freshly hatched naupliae but continuing to use the older ones the next two days, as I do it, too. If we are conscious of the fact, that fish need high nutritional value for growing and becoming fertile, then this is OK. There are probably more aquarium fish dying from overfeeding by a too much concentrated food but by the contrary. Leaving our adult Paros for the fortnight of a holiday without food is not only quite in order, but often we see them caring for eggs after our return.

I only wanted to say: Artemia is not Artemia, regardless the age. Freshly hatched, they are of concentrated value, older they have other values. We must know what we are doing. Paros love adult or nearly adult Artemiae, too. But to get the Artemia to this stage we have to feed (“boost”) the naupliae, otherwise they die within days or consist of hard shells only for some hours till death. And I wanted to say: the cystshells do no harm, at least not to our fish.

[quote=”Peter Finke” post=4062]
The nutritional value of Artemia naupliae vanishes rather rapidly after hatching. It is best immediately after hatching, and nearly to nothing after three days without being fed. This does not mean that “old naupliae” should not be fed to the fishes, but we should be conscious of that. We can bring female licorice gouramies to fertility with fresh Artemia but not with unboostered old naupliae.[/quote]

Peter is very right here. The nauplii may lose more than 1/3 of their nutritional value during the first 24 hours. Instar 1 nauplii only consume the yolksack and start to feed after reaching instar 2. It depends on temperature, it usually takes approximately 8 hours in room temerature before you can start feeding. You can also store them in refrigerator (temperature lower than 10 °C), then the loss would be less than 5% during the first day. When stored refrigerated, they almost do not grow and you can use them very safely for a little more then 24 hours as freshly hatched. When raising the fry I hatch artemia every other day and store it this way. If I have a surplus of the nauplii after the first 24 hours, I put them aside and feed them with chlorella that I have adapted for saline environment.