Hatching Brine

Alright... so I'm wanting to feed some fresh hatched baby brine to my tank, specifically for my goby and mandarin. Had a few ideas about feeding it and I thought I would run by you guys and see if you knew of anymore info.

My idea is to have a little dish sitting down in the sand bed, I want it to have a cover on top, and I want the cover to have several holes in it, but not large enough for snails, crabs, fish ect to get into. I'll stack some rock rubble on top of it to hide it. One of the holes will have to be large enough to get a piece of airline tubing into, but anywho... I'm wanting to put the eggs into the tubing of a syringe and squirt the eggs into the dish... then they'll hatch and swim out into the tank. Every other day before I put new eggs in I'll suck out the old egg shells and duds from the dish... then put in some new ones.

So... does this sound like it would work? Will the brine hide and mature in my tank? Would they breed? Will they die? Could I do this in my refugium? Any other advise?

I thought about getting a hatchery... and then I thought heck... why not just do a hatchery type thing inside of the tank itself. That's where it all started...

Matt
The dish thingy might work to put already hatched brine in but the eggs probably want hatch that way as they should be tumbled to get them to hatch. Why not try this, get a 2 liter coke bottle and an airstone and pump. Put the eggs in saltwater from your tank after a water change. Us the airstone to tumble the eggs in the bottle. When the brine hatch, you can syphon the live babies from the bottle with your airline and inject them into your covered dish so they can get out slowly. I don't think they will live long in an aquarium though and probably never get grown, I'm pretty sure they need saltier water and food you can't give them like yeast, but they will hatch in 1025, I used to hatch and feed them, the bottle works great for hatching. You can put a flashlight against the bottle and the babies will collect at the light for easy syphoning. I don't think I would put the eggs in the aquarium though, these can cause bad things to happen to your fish if they eat them.

Cool. This is why I ask! I think I'll make up two of these and start trying it out. I'm going to start with just a 20oz bottle. Just have to order in brine shrimp eggs. Since I don't need a place for the junk eggs to stay... I'll just squirt the hatched brine into a rock rubble pile. :-)

Alright... so I'm getting my brine in on Wednesday. They take two days to hatch... so they'll need to be in the bottle for 48 hours. I've read they need 81 to 82 degrees temp... any ideas for keeping the water a steady temp during the two days?

If you are hatching them in a 2 liter bottle just float that bottle in a 5 gallon bucket of tap water and put a heater in it set on 81 degrees. You need an air stone in the bottle to circulate water.

That would work well... I'll just have to put a weight on it. I'm going to find out if they'll hatch in 78 degree water... because this little heater I picked up isn't adjustable. Haha.

When I had dwarf seahorses I bought some hatcheries that fit inside a tank . ( I'll have to look in the supply closet for them. ) They had attachments for an air line and you could mount them with suction cups or HOB brackets.

If I'm not mistaken , bbs will hatch at cooler temps but it takes longer. The best thing you can do is have several batches separated by 24-36 hour intervals. You might also want to look into unshelled (decapsulated) eggs . The theory is that the naupuli don't use the energy required to burst out of the egg so there's more available as a food source.

I saw a small box made of plastic lighting covers buried under rubble used as a 'pod sanctuary at The Reef Tank. Supplemented with bbs , it should do the trick for your mandarin.