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.

Sea Monkeys, Take Two

I've started the tank for the second time!

Here is everything I'm using to raise some brine shrimp:



The same 1.5 gallon tank I had before, some coarse salt, spirulina flakes, and brine shrimp eggs. My tank came with the pump and tubing and I got it used for $15. Altogether, with the tank included, I paid slightly less than $40 for everything. Not as cheap as the original $19 sea monkey kit, but pretty damn cheap to set up an aquarium nonetheless.



The only aquarium salt I found was kind of expensive, so I looked around for some sea salt. Confusingly, the only sea salt I found was iodized. WTF is the point of sea salt if it contains the same things as table salt? As the bag says, this stuff contains no additives, and was only about $3.50. I could have gotten a box of aquarium salt that's about 1/3 or 1/4 of the size of this bag for about the same price, which still isn't terrible, but hopefully it should do the trick.



I got the spirulina flakes based on the fact that sea monkeys apparently live on microalgae, and judging by the blue-green colour of the sea monkey food packets, they contain spirulina. Some sites make it sound like they will eat pretty much anything, though -- yeast is another favourite, and might be cheaper than buying actual fish food.



The all-important brine shrimp eggs. They come in a little glass vial, but I split them with someone so mine are chilling in an empty pill bottle now. They look like fine brown sand and there are MILLIONS in that tiny container. Assuming a high percentage of them are viable, and you aren't raising masses of brine shrimp for fish food, for about $10 that should be all the eggs you ever need.

I am following the instructions on the back of the egg package right now pretty closely, using 2 tbsp of salt per litre of water (I have 5 liters in my tank now). I'm happy to see the water is nice and clear, unlike last time:



However, instead of adding 1 tsp of brine shrimp eggs per litre of water, I just put in a little bit -- I filled the larger side of the spoon that comes with the sea monkey kit:



It's still a ton of eggs. They are supposed to be floating around constantly in motion in the water, but mine are getting stuck in the corners a bit and also just falling to the bottom:



Every once in a while I stir them up again with a spoon. A more vigorous pump to move the water constantly would be better, as well as a tank without corners. If this doesn't work, I might try hatching them in the original sea monkey tank.

Another thing I'm not doing is regulating the temperature or PH levels. The water feels cooler to the touch than the recommended 26-28°C (80-82°F), but I'm not really willing to get a heater at this point, or mess with PH levels. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

So, I put these eggs in water last evening. In optimal conditions it should take 24-36 hours for them to hatch, so maybe tomorrow I'll see signs of life!

Tough Little Guys

Sea monkeys are incredibly tough little guys. Even though most of my population was wiped out immediately when I transferred them to the new tank, I've been seeing 2-3 sea monkeys at a time moving around in there until yesterday, when I'm sorry to say the last one must have died.

It's amazing to think of what they can endure. I hate that they were suffering...I had a little water left in the old tank, and I considered trying to rescue them. However, on the advice of a responsible fish owner, I decided not to shock them again by moving them a second time, even if it was to more hospitable conditions.

I still can't bring myself quite yet to turn the pump off, just in case there are one or two still alive hidden in the fake plant. I am going away this weekend, and I will be picking up some brine shrimp eggs and aquarium or sea salt (since there seems to be no preference, I will just get whatever is cheaper). Next week I begin setting up the tank again!

Disaster

So, I got overexcited, and overconfident, and screwed up, and currently my entire sea monkey population has been decimated.

The problem is this:



I was so excited about getting a bigger tank that I didn't take the time to make their transition as stress-free as possible. I should have done more research to find out what salinity would be best, and I DEFINITELY should not have used table salt. Because I used table salt when I did my first water change, and the population seemed to be holding steady, I got overconfident and thought that table salt would be okay. Stupid. Table salt has some stuff in it that aquarium or pure sea salt does not, like iodine.



Why is the water cloudy like that? Too much salt? I have no idea. But instead of making sure things were okay, I just waited a couple of days and then basically dumped my current tank into the bigger one.

It's been a few days now, and from what I can see in the cloudy water (which isn't much), I have one sea monkey left of the population of 15-20 that was holding steady in the smaller tank.

Sigh. Failure #1.

I am not going to give up, though. The next step is to get brine shrimp eggs and try to hatch them in the new tank, once I do some more research. Now that I have an idea of what sea monkeys are like, I will be able to tell if there are any real differences between them and "regular" brine shrimp.

So, I probably won't be making any posts for a week or two, but the page links should be growing as I find more information about sea monkeys and brine shrimp. After that, it'll be time to get some eggs and try again!

Sea Monkeys, 1 month old

These are some pictures of my sea monkeys taken June 13th, so they were about a month or so old. Unfortunately, due to over-hasty and under-informed movement to the new tank, they are no more. :( I am really upset about this, since they were just getting big enough to really see and enjoy, and for it to really feel like a loss. Poor little guys. I'll do better next time.

First Water Change

Today, I changed the water in the tank for the first time. The official sea monkey website says that you will never need to do this. However, the official sea monkey people also have no interest or desire for you to maintain your tank for over a year. They also don't want you to figure out how to "purify" your own water. If you just let it evaporate and replace the water every so often, the concentration of...whatever...in the purifier packet stays constant in the water. So, that's an option. But that's not what I want to do.

I was inspired by this video, which shows a healthy sea monkey tank still going after two years: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkYbirXYoqo&feature=related
This person says that he/she replaced the water in his or her tank whenever it seemed too dirty and the sea monkeys began to die. My population has dropped from 50 or more to around 20-25, so I figured it was worth a shot.

All I did was siphon them out and into another container, then suck some of the water out and drop it into some filtered salted water (I put a tsp of table salt into about 4-8 oz. of the water). Then, I put the sea monkeys back in, and added the old water mixed with fresh salted water back into the tank to the fill line (I had overfilled it before, making it hard to aerate the water with the aqua-leash. I'm going to estimate I removed and replaced about 1/5 of the water during the water change.

They seemed peppier pretty much immediately, although they might just be appreciating the extra oxygen in their water.

Sea Monkeys FTW!

I really like sea monkeys, or brine shrimp, or whatever you want to call them. Unfortunately it seems very hard to find information on sea monkeys OR brine shrimp (the official sea monkey site claims there is a distinct difference, but I have yet to see proof of this).

Most information on brine shrimp all relates to how to hatch them so you can feed them to your "real" pets. Well, these are my "real" pets. They are really cool! I put my sea monkey eggs in water May 18, 2011, so they're about 3 weeks old, now. The largest ones are about half a centimeter long.

Anyway, I'll get into the specifics in another post. The point is, I made this blog so that the next time someone went looking for information on sea monkeys, they would find more than I did. I don't really know what I'm doing, so there's going to be a lot of trial and error. But my goal is to have a healthy, sustainable sea monkey population that lasts at least a few years.