Brine Shrimp Out of Control!!!!

Dear Sean:

I’m sorry to hear about the tornado that has caused you problems, but at least it didn’t cause you any more harm than a temporary power outage. That’s always a pain in the neck but one can always cope and manage somehow until our comes back on again, and it’s good that you’re able to move your seahorses back home so that they didn’t suffer any ill effects in the meantime.

I don’t think the population explosion of brine shrimp is anything that you need to be overly concerned about, sir. The newly hatched brine shrimp are probably clustering on the glass surfaces in order to feed on a film of microalgae. When they have exhausted that food source, they will begin to die off if your filters don’t "eat" them first and filter them out before they have a chance to starve. Either way, that will take care of the baby brine shrimp boom, and your tank will soon be back to normal. If some of the Artemia nauplii manage to find enough microalgae to grow to maturity, they will just provide a welcome snack for your seahorses.

In the meantime, I don’t think you need to worry that the brine shrimp are going to deplete your copepod population too much. The brine shrimp are filter feeders that will take in what ever is suspended in the water column, whereas the copepods will be orienting to the live rock and the bottom of the aquarium, and spend most of their time on the substrate, so I don’t think the brine shrimp will have much of an impact in your pods.

You might need to change the pre-filter or mechanical filtration in your external filter if it filters out a ton of newly hatched brine shrimp, so you can remove them before they begin to decompose so you can be sure that they won’t cause an ammonia spike or degrade your water quality, but that’s no big deal.

If you want to remove swarms of newly hatched brine shrimp from your aquarium quickly, you could hook up a diatom filter to the seahorse tank in your office and let it run for an hour or two. That would certainly clean out any of the free swimming Artemia nauplii and remove them from your seahorse tank. But I think this is a problem that will probably take care of itself over the next few days, so as long as your seahorses aren’t in any sort of distress from the swarms of baby brine shrimp, you can probably just relax and let things run their course.

Best of luck with the seahorses at your office, Sean!

Respectfully,
Pete Giwojna

Post edited by: Pete Giwojna, at: 2008/04/10 19:30