Auto Dosing Brine Shrimp?

[entacmaea]

I'm posting this because I realized that automatically dosing brine shrimp could have major implications for keeping finicky fish like dragonets and NPS corals.
After reading about Chinese reefers feeding brine shrimp to make NPS corals thrive and the Paul B brine shrimp feeder, I realized that automatically dosing brine shrimp could make this wildly successful feeding method even easier to implement. There are some issues with this idea, but most of those issues are easy to solve. Brine shrimp eggs can be prevented from fouling the water column by having separate dosing and hatching setups or using decapsulated brine shrimp. Baby brine shrimp last significantly longer than a day or two with the addition of gut loading foods like spirulina or phytoplankton. Plus, because brine shrimp are alive, they don't need to be chilled at all times like frozen food. It seems like a really good idea, but I still have quite a few questions I'm trying to figure out the answer to.

1. How many days do brine shrimp last with the addition of foods like spirulina or phytoplankton?
2. Will refrigeration improve this process even more? If so, how will it do so and by how much?
3. Will dosing lines need to be rinsed after feeding the brine shrimp? How can I make this automatic? Is there a valve that combines multiple lines of airline tubing and can automatically switch which side of the tubing is open? Basically, if I have airline tubing split into fresh RODI water and a brine shrimp dosing container, can I make it so that it switches which of the two liquids are pulled into the dosing line, thereby making the rinsing process automatic?
4. How can I figure out how much brine shrimp I need to dose for my tank size and how often?
5. The lifespan of brine shrimp is extended through feeding, but how long are the brine shrimp the right size for? Basically, if only baby brine shrimp that are a certain size fit into the polyps of a gorgonian, will the feeding process make them unsuitable for feeding even though the brine shrimp are still technically "good"?

I know it's a lot of questions but I would highly appreciate any input on this!

 

[afboundguy]

Ironically I have thought about automating BBS while trying to automate my setup as best as I can.

1 - "Last" is a relative term. I would think you'd want them nutritious so you'd need to keep them gut loaded until feeder/dosing

2 - might make them live longer by slowing them down but hatching BBS is so easy I wouldn't think it would be worth refrigerating them.

3 - I would say keeping them clean would be worthwhile. You could either do a DIY dosing pump to reverse the flow or do something similar to @WallyB DIY dosing pump where he adds a bunch or RODI to flush and clean the lines

4 - depends on how many fish and what size tank you have. I am a firm believer that even if you "overfeed" it'll just add to biodiversity of tank.

5 - BBS are only "nutritional" within first 24 hours and typically as close to when they hatch while they still have their yolk. After they pass 24 hours their mouths form after they've consumed the yolk sack and need to be gut loaded to be nutritional. Again I think feeding freshly hatched BBS is easiest and I don't ever gut load them and I just feed the tank the BBS 1-3 days.

I have that if I would automate dosing BBS I would do it with the upsidedown bottle hatchery and I would set timer to shut off bubbler so eggs would go to top and then have a solenoid that would open up to release the BBS into the tank.

Would be interesting to try and vary up the bottles as typically people offset the hatching in each bottle so you would either need a more complicated custom dosing pump with multiple solenoids to offset which setup would dose the tank at once.

I use the circular hatchery disks as I find them easier and had thought I could run a dosing line from the center to the tank but keeping the line clean would be a challenge unless I programmed it to run in reverse to clean the line as best as possible.