Feeding live mysid shrimp?

[JHemdal]

Hi all,

I'm curious if anyone is feeding live mysids to their seahorses or pipefish. I'm surveying public aquariums as well, but I wanted to see if things have changed in the past few years on the hobbyist front. I know a couple of companies are selling them now, and was just curious if anyone was buying?

Jay Hemdal

p.s. - the reason why I'm interested is that I'm helping a not-for-profit company that hires handicapped folks and they may explore a pilot program raising mysids for sale......

 

[philter4]

I feed all my fish live mysis, but I collect them while diving, so I don't buy. It is not the main source of food, if I happen to see lg schools of them I net them up other wise I don't go looking for them so it is not a regular part of the diet, just a treat.

 

[asianer]

philter4, what is the main staple of your seahorses diet?

 

[philter4]

Right now I only keep pipefish, bluestriped and redstriped, but I have collected and kept seahorses when I had more tanks. I used to get them to start feeding on live shrimp,(mysis, ghost and brine) but I also kept them with other fish and it seemed that they would pick up on frozen pretty fast. I had a pair of red seahorses (both had white saddles, the male 3 and the female 5) that I wish I never got rid of, they were in a mixed fish/invert tank and ate any frozen food I put in the tank and occasionally would eat a flake if it looked right (don't know what a seahorse sees as right, but they would pick and choose) They were collected together and I kept them together until I changed the tank for a baby queen trigger I caught. I see yellow and black seahorses all the time at one site I dive, but I don't have a tank that I think they would do well in, all mine have multiple dwarf angels and wrasses plus other fish I think would disturb them.

 

[pledosophy]

Jay, honor to have you in the forum. Wish you were around more often. Loved your article in Marine Fish and Reef last year. Just kinda stoked to see you around.

I tried feeding and culturing my own live mysids for a few months but found it to time consuming for my taste. I could not produce enough fast enough to keep up with the needs of my pair of seahorses, even though I was running 6 20g tanks in my attempt to do so.

I did feed live fresh water ghosts to my WC reidi for the 5.5 years I kept them. It was a good diet for them and did not require supplementaion IME. Ghosts were fairly cheap in my area at the time. I would feed 12 a day which would cost me a dollar.

The cheapest I have found mysids for sale is from a member mysidman on seahorse.org. He was selling them for 100 for $20 plus shipping. $20 was less then a weeks supply.

While I think it is a very noble cause I think the reason not many people are raising them has to do with the time, space and labor involved to turn a profit. JMO Perhaps other avenues like pods, rotifers, and even phyto could be less labor intensive and address the needs of a bigger market. Just a thought.

If you would like to further your inquiry we could post something for you on seahorse.org, or syngnathid.org as well.

Please feel free to let me know if you would like my help in doing so.

Kevin.

I'm really stoked just to see you in here.

 

[JHemdal]

Kevin,

Thanks for the info. I've seen mysids selling for that .20 cents per piece price. I did a quick calculation the other day - I weighed out 10 mysids on an analytical balance - unless I dropped a decimal, there are 285,000 live mysids in one kilogram of them. At 20 cents each, that works out to be $57,000 per kilo!
Of course, a medium sized facility (say 1000 gallon capacity) can only produce around 10 grams of them per week.

Jay

 

[pledosophy]

Hope everyone knows we're talking about fish. :eek1: :lol:

 

[melsteve]

We sell WC mysids at $100 per box and have approx 30 grams per box wish we could sell them at 20cents each
Steve