What are the Guidelines for Culturing Brine Shrimp?

The benefits of feeding live Artemia are well known and accepted across the Australian aquarium community. Alternatively, there are many convenient and well-formulated artificial, inert diets that purport to completely eliminate the need for such live food. These prepared diets and, more importantly, the specific amino acids, lipids, and vitamins they contain are, if not complete replacements for live feed, often necessary additions to a single-species diet lacking in one or more of the essential nutrients.

That having been said, seldom does a soggy, inanimate particle of gelatinised starch and dried fishmeal ignite the feeding response in fish like the herky-jerky swimming antics of a live brine shrimp. For this reason, live brine shrimp will always be an integral part of the solution for sustaining healthy aquarium populations.

In addition to moving about the water column, live brine shrimp have a number of other useful traits, namely:

They are soft and easily digestible, containing enzymes that help fish to better utilise other feeds.
They are high in protein, ranging from 55% to 60% protein by dry weight, supporting rapid weight gain in fry and young fish.
They can be enriched with other feeds or additives—a process often referred to as “bio-encapsulation”—in order to deliver HUFAs (highly unsaturated fatty acids), antibiotics, or other nutrients to the target species (such as using SELCO).
They can be fed to both marine and freshwater fish, surviving and swimming for hours—even in fresh water.
They originate in hyper-saline biotopes and, therefore, they are seldom vectors for diseases that affect fish.
They grow quickly, multiplying in weight 500-fold in three to four weeks and increasing in size from 450 microns to 1.5 centimetres in length.

Yet, raising brine shrimp to maturity in useful numbers is not an easy task; you can expect to spend as much time at it, if not more, as you would breeding and caring for baby fish—often with less-than-hoped-for results. The following primer is designed to help obviate the need to commit the most frequent mistakes—most often, the mistakes of overstocking, overfeeding, underfeeding, inadequate aeration, under-filtration, and providing inappropriate feeds.

Given the myriad ways to inadvertently kill these critters, even in a comfortable, controlled environment, it seems counter-intuitive, if not downright discouraging to the aquarist, that an animal of prehistoric pedigree can, in its natural setting, be left high and dry in the baking Australian summer, desiccated for months under the hot sun, forcibly removed to a faraway clime in the gut of an avian migrant, re-deposited in a hyper-saline salt lake devoid of life, and subjected to sub-zero temperatures, only to emerge from its capsule to thrive again and even propagate.

Without further rumination, let’s assume that we’ve successfully hatched the eggs and wish to culture the brine shrimp. Can we not just send them off to a fancy boarding school?

Culture Tank Setup

The culture tank can be as simple as a 20-litre bucket or as involved as a $500 Kreisel tank. The important design considerations, when choosing or building a culture tank, are to allow for temperature control; adequate aeration (to maintain dissolved oxygen levels as well as to suspend food particles); internal or external water filtration and/or partial water replacement; and the concentration and evacuation of detritus, mortalities, and faecal matter (through screened drainpipes or siphoning).

Culture systems vary from batch or static systems to sophisticated flow-through tanks for high-density culture. If the intent is simply to observe a small number of brine shrimp, an aquarium with an under-gravel/mud filter and one or two directional airlift standpipes is ideal.

Stocking Densities

To improve your chances of success, start with stocking densities of 1,000 animals per litre or less.

How does one count 1,000 minuscule baby brine shrimp? The easiest way to manage Artemia counts is to sample from a randomly distributed population by extracting small aliquots of the whole, counting, and then extrapolating.

Aliquot Sampling Procedure

Prepare the Stock Bottle: Random distribution.
Transfer all the hatched animals into a 1-litre bottle containing clean seawater. Run heavy aeration to keep the brine shrimp in constant suspension so they are randomly distributed throughout the water column.
Extract the Sample: 1 mL aliquot.
Using a 1-millilitre pipette (or a calibrated eyedropper), pull exactly 1 mL of water from the middle of the bottle. This represents approximately 1/1,000th of the total population.
Count and Extrapolate: Repeat for accuracy.
Count the live nauplii in your sample. If you started with 1 gram (about 1/2 teaspoon) of an 80% hatch-out quality egg, a successful hatch should yield upwards of 200,000 baby brine shrimp, meaning you should see about 200 animals in your 1 mL sample.

Note: If this process has already exceeded your tolerance for tedium, you may want to consider stopping here, enriching all the newly harvested brine shrimp contained in the 1-litre bottle with SELCO, and feeding the fortified baby brine shrimp straight to your fish or seahorses. But, if you insist on bigger and beefier brine shrimp, read on. Just remember—you had your chance!

Water Parameters & Environment

Maintaining strict water parameters is the line between a thriving culture and a crashed bucket.

Parameter	Optimal Target Range	Management Notes
Salinity	35–40 ppt (SG 1.024–1.028)	Use aquarium-grade marine salt mixes. Avoid standard pool salt or table salt for culturing.
pH	7.5 – 8.0	Tends to drop over time. Buffer upward using standard sodium bicarbonate (baking soda).
Temperature	20°C – 25°C	Maintain consistency; ensure top-up water matches the tank temperature to avoid thermal shock.
Dissolved Oxygen	Above 2.5 mg/L	Oxygen stress is indicated by the shrimp turning red (due to increased haemoglobin production).

Aeration plays a dual role: it provides oxygen and keeps food particles suspended. Small bubbles are highly efficient for gas exchange, but avoid ultra-fine micro-bubbles, as they can lodge in the swimming appendages of the Artemia and prevent them from feeding. If oxygen drops below the target, add an extra coarse airstone rather than cranking up a micro-bubble diffuser.

Feeding Strategies

Artemia are continuous, non-selective filter feeders. The most difficult challenge in culturing them is providing appropriately sized feed in sufficient concentrations without completely ruining your water quality. Fortunately, several accessible feeds match their target requirements of under 20 microns in size.

Live Diatoms (The Premium Choice): The preferred feed for Artemia is cultured, live diatoms such as Nannochloropsis sp., Tetraselmis sp., and Dunaliella sp. However, raising live green water requires a parallel culturing effort. Because brine shrimp are voracious feeders, they can clear a green water tank overnight. Always keep backup dry or frozen feeds on hand in case your algae cultures crash.
Concentrated Algae Pastes: Cryo-preserved algae pastes are an excellent, low-maintenance alternative. These contain highly concentrated, non-viable algal cells that can be added drop-wise.
Dry Alternatives & Brans: Spray-dried yeasts (like Torula), Arthrospira platensis (Spirulina powder), or micronised forms of rice bran, corn bran, and soy can be used. To prepare brans, whiz them in an electric blender with seawater and pass the liquid through a 250-mesh or finer filter bag. Avoid feeds that readily leach soluble nutrients into the water, as they fuel massive bacterial blooms and foul the shrimp’s appendages.

System Maintenance & Waste Filtration

As the animals grow, you must scale your mechanical filtration to handle the waste without losing your livestock or their food:

Initial Setup: Use internal or external filters with a 100-micron mesh screen.
At Two Weeks: Swap to a 350-micron mesh screen to allow finer waste particles to escape while retaining the larger shrimp.
Preventing Clogs: Position an airstone directly in front of effluent filter screens to keep the rising bubbles from blinding (clogging) the mesh.
Monitoring Gut Fullness: Periodically scoop a beaker of culture water and hold it against a bright light. Inspect the animals closely—you can easily see if their digestive tract is packed full or empty. You can also use a mini Secchi disc to monitor water clarity and adjust your feed dosage accordingly.

Biosecurity & Disease Management

In a protein-rich, warm culture environment, it is common for filamentous Leucothrix bacteria to emerge. Vibrio sp. bacteria and other infectious issues can also cause sudden crashes.

Because we do not have access to over-the-counter aquatic antibiotics without veterinary intervention in Australia, biosecurity is your primary line of defence. Ensure you source high-quality, clean cysts. Routinely wash down and sterilise all culture apparatus, buckets, and airlines using a standard sodium hypochlorite (bleach) solution, followed by a thorough rinse and dechlorinator before restarting. If an outbreak occurs in a running culture, raising the salinity slightly can help suppress bacterial replication.

The Bottom Line

Producing live adult Artemia in sufficient numbers to sustain a large fish room or commercial seahorse setup requires relentless, 24/7 maintenance. If you are running a high-density system (10,000+ animals per litre), you will need a robust mechanical filtration and water exchange system—essentially a mini recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) complete with a protein skimmer.

For local hobbyists, keeping things low-density (1,000 animals per litre) in static batch systems with regular water changes is highly rewarding, far less taxing, and a great way to bring out the absolute best color and vitality in your livestock. Start small, nail your feeding adjustments, and scale up from there.