Dragonfaces and artemia eggs

micstarz

New member
Will dragonface pipefish learn to take de-capsulated brine shrimp eggs instead of baby brine shrimp? It would be so much more nutritious and be less of a hassle for me...
 
Are you feeding the pipe something other than brine? As you mention, it isn't that nutritious to being with (although decapping does help.) It is usually said that brine alone can not sustain any fish.

I would be worried that the brine eggs would cause a blockage in the pipe. An encapsulated egg (as I understand it) is sort of akin to a chicken's egg in those foam egg cartons. The egg carton is the "encapsulation" in this analogy. You need that carton to ship the eggs to the store and safely house them at the store and in your home. The carton is to protect against those things that wouldn't normally assult the egg if the hen was sitting on it (in which case, it just need the shell of the egg.) Well, encapsulation gets brine shrimp eggs through harsh times and gives a next generation an opportunity to live on. Once the encapsulation is "broken through," you still have the egg shell that the brine has to hatch out of. That is why brine can cause blockages. And you wouldn't want that. I haven't studied brine extensively, but I think all of that is true. I apologize if it isn't.
 
actually, if you feed BBS that is <24 hrs old, they are still very nutritious, as they still have their yolk sac. in fact, they don't even have mouths until they're a day old, so newly hatched BBS is a good food if that's all that's available.

live copeods or frozen cyclopeeze are great foods for DF's. lots of peeps have success with "oyster eggs" as well.
 
has anyone had any luck feeding this? I have one that isn't really taking cyclopse or (not-live) bbs. He took cyclopse in the store very well, but taking neither at home. Still eating plenty of pods, but just wondering... He looks very interested, but hasn't eaten prepared stuff. Oyster eggs seems way too small to me, also. Prawn eggs maybe though.
 
Ray,

Thanks for the link. One of these days when my eyeballs can sustain long periods of screen reading, I am going to better familiarize myself w/ brine shrimp biology. But my first look suggests that the down size of feeding the eggs is that they do not move, and therefore don't always trigger a feeding response.

Sorry, I thought a cyst formed round an egg. I'm going to stick w/ seaslugs!
 
When you get to reading, you will find that the brine shrimp normally reproduce live born, and cysts are produced when conditions are not good for their survival.
If food or water conditions are not suitable, they DO produce cysts and that is what we buy in the stores in cans, tubes, or bottles.
In nature, the cysts hatch and grow to reproducing adults again once conditions return to normal again.
Decapping the cysts is basically a bleach treatment that changes that outer cyst so that only a soft membrane basically is left to contain the egg.
Advantage would be ridding the cysts of the high bacterial problems they are known to have, and some find that decapped hatch faster with a higher hatch rate.
 
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