Artemia Methods

[Arno Beißner]

Hello Paro friends

I am a new member from Bavaria. Thank you all for your helpful posts here at PP. The first young Quindecim swim already 🙂
Here I want to show you my method with the Artemia.
Maybe it’s for one or two helpful.
Without Air-Stone I get so every day fresh Artemia.
I use cheap salt tablets for regeneration systems (14 g per 0.9 liters of water)
The hatched nauplii I aspirate with a syringe at the viewing window of the plastic container.
I hope the picture explains it sufficiently and the translator is working properly.

warm regards
Arno

[Dorothee Jöllenbeck-Pfeffel]

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!

[Dorothee Jöllenbeck-Pfeffel]

Update:
With the described sieves it just works the first day after the first nauplies have been born. Afterwards they are too big and also doesn’t come down but to the surface when the bubble pump is off. And its impossible with my sieves to separate them from the egg shells.

But the first day, it is o.k.!

[Dorothee Jöllenbeck-Pfeffel]

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….

[helene schoubye]

I think they leave the eggs, – let them sink to the bottom and don’t touch them. I think they pick out the live airtime only 🙂

[Arno Beißner]

100% separation is not possible even with my system.
Dorothee’s method is more accurate since.
But this is not so important I think.
The few eggshells more of a visual problem in the tank are.
On eggshells suffocated fish I have never yet seen;-)
This is probably a fable / legend.

Some Artemia varieties can be separated very bad.
Others, again very good.

[Dorothee Jöllenbeck-Pfeffel]

Thanks for your clear answer, Arno. I also think I overestimate that problem. But I really had a fine group of young rice fish which died completely after eating naupliae with eggs.

[Arno Beißner]

ok, maybe some species more sensitive – or not so picky
eat.
If you want to be sure you can try the method of Gerd Arndt: http://www.aquarienbastelei.de/?page_id=307
This works very well. I’ve tried. maybe you can
the container for larger quantities Artemia enlarge.

[Pavel Chaloupka]

[quote=”Arno” post=4058]100% separation is not possible even with my system.
Dorothee’s method is more accurate since.
But this is not so important I think.
The few eggshells more of a visual problem in the tank are.
On eggshells suffocated fish I have never yet seen;-)
This is probably a fable / legend.
Others, again very good.[/quote]

Well, the problem is usually not a suffocation but a gut obstruction and sometimes bacterial and fungal spores but these mainly have negative effect on marine species as they come from similar environment. It is definitely not a rumor. It is one of the reasons why the cysts are decapsulated pre hatching in commercial hatcheries.

[Peter Finke]

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 Jöllenbeck-Pfeffel]

Thank you, I see.
And of course I feed them at once.

I was just looking for relatively safe methods to get more naupliae at the time (specially in winter) because I have now already three Paro tanks, soon they will be four, and one tank with Spaerichtys selatanensis. Even my senior – tank inhabitants love live food.

And as I’m myself living “Bio” as possible, I feel not good with using chemically decapsulated cysts.

[Peter Finke]

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.

[Dorothee Jöllenbeck-Pfeffel]

Thank you very much for the long answer, Peter!
Now I will be a little bit more relaxed concerning Naupliae!

And the Paroforum also convinced me to use Gardenlivingfood 😉 and my Paros began to spawn! 😉

Perhaps in some weeks I must give my linkei a time without such splendid food and two degrees C lower water temperature to have a rest!

[Pavel Chaloupka]

[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.

[Dorothee Jöllenbeck-Pfeffel]

Hallo Pawel, also thank you!

I do that also – if I have too much I store them (and other living food) in the fridge.
These days I was told at home now I could store my living food on the balcony instead of filling the fridge …;-)

[Author]

Posts