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.
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