Enriching baby brine shrimp with golden pearls?

[LordJoshaeus]

Hi everyone! From what I have read, the ideal food particle size for feeding brine shrimp nauplii (baby brine shrimp) once they gain the capacity to eat is 1-50 microns...about the same size as the smallest golden pearls fry food available (5-50 microns). With that in mind, could I enrich the brine shrimp by feeding them golden pearls? Thanks

 

[ichthyogeek]

Given that brine shrimp aren't discriminatory feeders, I don't see why they wouldn't feed on the golden pearls. My question though, is why do you want to do that?

 

[LordJoshaeus]

Given that brine shrimp aren't discriminatory feeders, I don't see why they wouldn't feed on the golden pearls. My question though, is why do you want to do that?

Golden pearls have a lot of nutrients (DHA, for example) that are scarce in brine shrimp, and it seems that many fish that need live food as fry do not recognize golden pearls as food immediately anyway. While there are other products that would be more effective for enriching brine shrimp, most of them require more work (blending, basically).

 

[ichthyogeek]

Golden pearls have a lot of nutrients (DHA, for example) that are scarce in brine shrimp, and it seems that many fish that need live food as fry do not recognize golden pearls as food immediately anyway. While there are other products that would be more effective for enriching brine shrimp, most of them require more work (blending, basically).

While this is true, by the time most fish get to the "I need to eat something older than Instar I" stage of artemia nauplii (Instar I being the stage where they don't have a functional digestive tract), they're usually also ready to be weaned onto prepared foods. At which point, it's more time/cost-efficient to just get the fish onto a prepared food.

Additionally, Pavlova algae paste does exist. If I remember correctly, Pav has the correct blend of DHA/EPA that most larval fish need. One of the reasons it's not cultured intensively, is because it's a finicky microalgae species (in comparison to T-Iso and Nanno). The only blending that you need to do is to make sure the paste gets adequately suspended into the water column (which you'd have to use for golden pearls anyways).

I recommend that you look into acquiring a copy of Matt Wittenrich's book, which details the feeding cycles of a lot of marine fish larvae.