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Are they brine shrimp? why are they called sea monkeys? Any info would be great.

Yes, they are brine shrimp. The name Sea Monkeys is just a marketing term to sell the product.

Jim

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Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody. -- Mark Twain

I suspect the whole sea monkey thing started with grits novelty advertising in the usa in the 50's. It was common until even the 80's to see them advertised in the back of kids magazines and funny papers. The cysts were sold via mail, together with novelty items such as X-ray glasses , and exploding cigarettes etc with rather poor instructions on how to make them hatch, though unfortunately not how to keep them alive for more than a day, or breed them. Doubtless it led to many disappointed children.

They were advertised with little cartoon images of monkeys to appeal to children. They were of course ,as you quite rightly mention, artemia brineshrimp cysts, if you were lucky you got those little african shrimp (the name escapes me) that hatch in pools after the rains that looked a bit like small trilobytes instead.

Someone presumably thought they looked a bit like monkeys , and in a demented way the name stuck and is still occasionally used today.If you really want some theres no need to wait for mail order though, your lfs probably has loads in the fridge

So, if they are artemis shrimp, then that would mean they need salt to survive right? We have tried to raise them a couple of times, originally as a source of food for the first betta we had, and a nature lesson for the kids. They didn't last for very long at all, we followed the instructions and everything.
The next time we tried they had come up with an aeration tool, basically a plastic pipette with a diffuser on the end, you need to aerate a few times a day with it, better to drop in an airstone on low. We never got ours to more than 1/4". I thought that was pretty good.
I have brine shrimp eggs but haven't tried it again yet. This time it would be as a food source, so I don't want to mess it up.

"If you're afraid you'll make a mistake, you won't make anything."
-Family Circus

Hmm.

Apparently, according to this page, Brine Shrimp, Artemia salina, feed on single celled algae and proteinaceous matter in the detritus on the lake bottom.

So, to make your Brine Shrimp grow to a decent size (my LFS supplies adults that are up to ½" long pre-bagged) you need to cultivate algae in the Brine Shrimp rearing facility. You could also try using baker's yeast to feed the second stage nauplii until the algal crop is large enough to sustain them through to adulthood. I would hazard a guess that the kind of algae you would need would be salt-tolerant anaolgues of the Volvox and Euglena organisms that form a component of freshwater phytoplankton. I know that 'green water' (which is fresh water that contains a surfeit of nutrients that allow these algae to bloom) is used to feed Daphnia, so my guess would be that if you can create eutrophied salt water (excess phosphates would be an ingredient here) you could create, in theory at least, 'green brine' and hatch your shrimps in that.

Note that the site states that the shrimps live in hypersaline waters in the wild, whose salt content is as much as 25% by mass. This contrasts markedly with the salt content of sea water, which is 35 parts per thousand!

Typical cultures tend to be successful if you use double strength marine water (70 parts per thousand). Cultivate single celled algae in that water, and your Brine Shrimps should have sufficient food to fortify them through to adulthood.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Yeah, Sea monkeys are brine shrimp.

My brother bought one of those kits for £8.00, 10 hatched, nnone made it past a week, however, at my LFS, you get 100 for £0.70

I keep mine in a salt free dip jar, and they are all healthy and actice, until they get fed to my fish

i thought they were Triops?

*Chelle*
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I love the fishes cuz they're SOOO delicious...

Triops are the other little things I was talking about earlier, sometimes they get sold as sea monkeys too. Triops are definitely the more interesting of the two.

triops RULE! i had a dream about them last night because of this post.. shows what nyquil does to people!

*Chelle*
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I love the fishes cuz they're SOOO delicious...

Thanks!

Little n little y great big freaking Q! muhahaha

I have brine shrimp I raise for fry food but they dont last long. Are there websites that can show what kind of algae is good i.e. greenspot bb or can I just put yeast in small ammounts to feed them? Sorry for the silly questions

I always thought that brine shrimp were salt water. I guess Im wrong...

Inky

Triops are definitely the more interesting of the two.

Just curious 'why'?

Both Uncle Milton]http://www.unclemilton.com/[/link]-of Ant Farm fame-and [link=Drs. Foster and Smith sell triops kits. I was thinking this would be a cool gift for my younger son but Drs F & S hatching and growing info sounds a bit difficult. Any thoughts?



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There is water at the bottom of the ocean

Triops are disgustingly easy to rear. In all seriousness, all you have to do is add water. They'll hatch after a bit and you'll see really tiny little things moving about. Now, for some reason my Triops kit includes a bunch of fairy shrimp too, so the single Triops that hatched had other little shrimps to eat. In any case, Triops get bigger than Sea Monkeys, so in that way they're more interesting. They look cooler too.

These little crustaceans, since they live in very ephemeral pools, have to hatch, grow, and then reproduce very quickly. Because of this, they'll eat basically anything. If you run out of their pellet food, just use flake or some other fish food; it works (though generally their food doesn't disintegrate that quickly, which is a good thing for a container that probably doesn't and probably shouldn't have a filter). They'll shed often; you'll see exoskeletons everywhere after a while. Watch out though. In their frenzy to breed and eat everything, they'll even eat each other. If you're worried about having a second generation, don't worry. First of all, some eggs are timed to hatch only after being wet a second time, so just dry the container out for a bit and fill it up again. Secondly, Triops are hermaphrodites and are able to fertilize their own eggs. So even if you've just got one Triops, it'll be able to reproduce. These things are pretty darn hard to kill off.

I need to restart my culture...

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The aquarist is one who must learn the ways of the biologist, the chemist, and the veterinarian.