Sea Monkey Break

So, clearly I have not been experimenting lately...I am actually going to be moving at the end of the month, and it makes sense to wait and transport an empty tank, rather than a full one. So, I will be back with more sea monkey adventures in September!

Failure number....well, let's stop counting

So, this tank worked pretty much the same as the last one -- the sea monkeys hatched, were visible for 4-5 days, then were wiped out.

For my next attempt I'll continue with the spirulina sludge, but read up on PH and perhaps add some baking soda to the water to change it.

Cautiously Optimistic...

There are definitely live sea monkeys in my tank right now. I don't want to get too excited, since it's only been 3 days, and it took 5 days last time for me to realize they were dying. I hope that changing the way I give them the spirulina helped. The water is slightly cloudy now, the way it's supposed to be:



Nothing to do but wait and see...

New Tank, Second Attempt

I'm going to change one thing at a time until I figure out what the problem was. So, everything about the tank is the same, except instead of putting in spirulina flakes, I'll be adding a few drops of this:



Spirulina sludge. It's the flakes I ground up, mixed with about 8 tbsp of the tank water.

Yesterday I changed about 1/5 of the tank water (because there were a lot of bubbles forming at the top, a sign of ammonia buildup), and tonight I added some more eggs. We'll see what happens!

Not Looking Good...

I'm not sure what happened...I'm sure I saw many live sea monkey hatchlings...and now I don't see any. Some possible problems:

1) PH level and/or temperature, since I wasn't monitoring those.
2) The spirulina flakes. I ground them up as fine as I could, but it still all sank to the bottom as far as I can tell. They might not have been able to get to it.

Nothing to do now but wait and see.

EDIT:

The spirulina flakes were definitely not ground finely enough to stay suspended in the water, but another problem may be the shape of my tank/power of my pump. It may be too easy for things to get stuck at the bottom/in the corners.

We Have Life!

At this point it's reeaaaally hard to tell, with the eggs floating around constantly in the water, but I can tell by the spazzy movements of some of the flecks that some sea monkeys have hatched! There's no way to tell how many...






I'm going to take the advice of the aquarticle on raising "large brine shrimp" and wait 24 hours to feed them. I plan to grind up the spriulina flakes into a fine powder and do as he suggested, wetting the tip of a match (or in my case probably a chopstick or something) and dipping it in the spirulina powder, then swishing it around in the water. He suggests to do this twice a day, but since they are so tiny and I'm not raising a huge crop of them, I think I will do it once a day for now until I can better assess how many there are.

So excited!!!

Meanwhile...

I can't remember or find where I read it now, but I came across the suggestion that if your tank crashes you can let the water completely evaporate and start over again. I don't have any purifier left, but if there are any viable eggs left at the bottom of the tank, it might be worth a try to start it over again. So, that's what I'm doing. It would be pretty neat if I had a tank of brine shrimp and of the Sea Monkey brand sea monkeys going at the same time, to compare them.