Do you have to enrich baby brine shrimp? I thought as long as you fed them to the fish right as they hatch you were okay.
Well over the years, people in the hobby found that lifespans were not too long, but when using enriched artemia, especially ongrown ones, the lifespan was increased. I enrich because I want as many months as possible out of them.
When brine hatch out, they don't all hatch at the same time. As soon as they hatch out, they start consuming the egg sack that contains the fatty acid nutrient. When you harvest for feeding to dwarfs, you will have varying degrees of egg sack depletion therefore varying degrees of nutrition going to the dwarfs.
In addition, fatty acid nutrients alone do not promote longevity.
By using a product like Dan's Feed from seahorsesource.com, it is a blend of many things and when you enrich the brine, you then give a better balanced nutrient profile to the dwarfs.
Unfortunately one cannot enrich newly hatched brine for about a day until they develop their digestive tracts. Then, it takes a long time for them to complete the enrichment.
So after harvesting newly hatched, you place them in new culture water and let them grow for a day until they get to the InstarII stage where they can feed. Then you enrich for two 12 hour stages with new water and enrichment for each 12 hour stage. They have a decent amount of nutrition after 12 hours, but by going 24 hours, you get a much more complete degree of nutrition.
As brine shrimp grow, it takes a bit less time to enrich for each Instar stage until as adults, the artemia can have a reasonable degree of nutrient after 4 hours, with 8 hours being optimal.
I've even converted some of my clownfish customers that buy rotifers and greenwater from me, to enriching rots and bbs for feeding their clown fry.
My dwarf tank is a 5g tank and I put 20 dwarfs in it and it's hard to find them all. I know it can handle a lot more.
There is a picture of my dwarf tank at the bottom of
my seahorse page