Today I have cleaned my hobby artemia breeders (I will call this the hobby from now on) that I bought after xmas from amazon to hatch baby brine shrimp (from now on called BBS). They haven't had any use for a couple of months as my juvenile axolotls are now eating blood worms and starting to eat chopped up worms so they are too big for baby brine shrimp.
This is what the inside of the hobby looks like:
It looks like this when it is closed:
The hobby works by filling with salt water and then sprinkling eggs in the outer ring. Once the lid is on the only source of light is in the middle of the hobby so the newly hatched BBS are attracted to the light and swim under the dividers to the center. The unhatched eggs and shells are kept in the outer ring by the dividers.
The hobby has a the following basket in it that is used to remove the BBS to feed to the axolotls:
The basket has a fine netting in the bottom so the water runs through leaving only the BBS which makes this method really easy to collect the BBS for feeding.
A downside of it is that the BBS are only collected in small amounts at one time and they take between 2 days to about a week to get to the center for collection.
This is why I have 2 of the hobby's so that I can stagger them so that when one is producing a lot of BBS the other is just being set up and will be at peak production when the other one is slowing down.
I found this method worked really well for me but I only used them for a small number of axolotls (10) so it was fine.
I found that the hobby also had virtually no smell compared to the fizzy drink method that I will explain tomorrow when I set one up.
Another advantage of the Hobby is that it does not require an artificial light source or an air pump so it is silent and uses no energy.
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