The
PAROSPHROMENUS PROJECT

The
PAROSPHROMENUS
PROJECT

Living food for Paros

#7164
Pavel Chaloupka
Keymaster

So, how I do it. You can construct a hatching bowl for zero cost from stuff everyone has at home. Using this method we are hatching artemia without aeration. This method is very usefull for everyone who needs to hatch small amounts of eggs as well as greater amounts, you just need to use a bigger bowl or more of them. Compared to the amounts doable with aeration, you can hatch more eggs this way. The always stressed out importance of high oxygen levels is simply achieved by the contact of the eggs with air on the water level. Even after hatching, if you do not use to much of eggs, the nauplii will not suffocate as they do in high pet bottles where all the surface is covered with the shells after you stop the aeration. This way, you get the best separation possible for hatching of normal eggs, e.g. you hardly ever see a single sheel if this is done right. 🙂
All you would need is transparent cup (from icecream for example) and a thin piece of expanded polystyrene. I think that picture says it all, you basicaly cover most of the cup with black gafa type and only leave couple centimeteres transparent for the nauplii to have a place to gather. Using the polystyrene, you create a septum that reaches pretty close to the bottom of the cup. Newly hatched artemia nauplii will swim down under the septum and will gather on the other side of the cup near the light where you have left the transparent part of the cup uncovered. There you can siphon them with air tubing or with a syringe, put in to the sieve and rinse.

Hatching guide: place the hatching bowl somewhere where you are sure you will not have to move it. Fill the bowl with the hatching solution and let it stay for a while until the water stops moving. Then gently sprinkle the water level (in the non transparent part of the cup with eggs. It is important to not move the cup so that eggs do not drop down from the surface. If some of it would drop down, its not much of a problem, high quality eggs will mostly hatch anyways. If you would have such problem continuosly, add a little more salt in to the hatching solution. But if you use the recommended salinity tha my Sanders eggs have on the packing, it is so high that it should like never happen 😀

Wait (with your eggs it should be no more then 20 hours depending on temperature) and siphon the nauplii.