Samw, your seahorse may be eating the bbs but it isn't really an adequate diet in the long run for it. And please don't consider buying that hatching thing, the water your bbs hatches in gets really nasty really quick and I'm sure it will get into your tank. Mysis shrimp etc would be much better... mine seem to take some in when it still has the eyes and is moving, but being frozen it doesn't move much .. unless... I have a small powerhead that keeps the water moving through the area the horses hang out (the corral) The mysis or plankton in my case tumble very slowly through and a few of them get eaten. Adult horses will only eat about 5 mysis shrimp a day so you don't need alot of food for them.
Beverly, brine shrimp are really easy to hatch out with a few very very simple tools... Two, two litre coke bottles that have been cleaned really well and still have the cap work great for hatching cones. Invert them so the cap is down, drill a hole in the center of the bottom (top now) large enough so a small funnel with fit in it. Rig a way so you can stand these two bottles side by side, I used an old plastic milk box you see at the grocery stores etc... Fill one 7/8ths or so of the way with fresh water and add 1 Tablespoon of your salt mix to the water. Now, take a length of rigid airline tube and cut it so it will rest on the cap when placed in the filler hole.... so its like a straw... use some airline to supply air from a small pump. NO AIRSTONES. Just use the smallest pump you can find, you don't want the water boiling just enough air to keep the eggs in suspension. Now the final thing to do is add some light, a 40 or a 60 watt bulb will supply the heat you need, you run the light 24/7 close enough to the cones so the water temp stays around 80 degrees.
The reason for two coke bottles is, one can be used to hatch out the newest eggs the other will be used to move the hatched bbs out of the first and into a container that they can be enriched in. You can use three coke bottles if you want to keep your shrimp for a longer period but I'm thinking you don't need to do that. I'm going to cut back to a double bottle set up again.
So to summerize, two coke bottles inverted with a small airpump work as your hatching cones, a single desk light will work as your heater and light source (brine shrimp eggs need the long photoperiod to hatch). Add a small amount of brine shrimp eggs (I use 1/4 of a tsp and get tons of bbs) add 1 table spoon of your salt mix and aerate for 24 hours. Remove the airline and let the hatched egg shells float to the top and the unhatched sink. The bbs will be visible swimming around, if you can set the light so it is near the bottom of the hatching cone the bbs will concentrate there, if they still hang out near the top simply siphon off some of the mix and then add fresh unsalted water, the lower salinity will encourage them to go deeper in the water.
This is the part I haven't mentioned yet, now you need one more peice of rigid airline tube with some airline hose. You should have this peice cut a bit shorter than the others... what I do is cut it so if I catch the airline where it joins the tubing against the edge of the hole I drilled in the bottom of the coke bottle... I cut the rigid airline tube so it will sit about 1/4 of an inch away from the bottom of the hatching cone. The reason I rest the tube like this is so I can start the siphon and then watch the bbs go into the bbs net. Resting it like this also helps to keep from stiring up the hatched egg shells. Once you have siphoned about 3/4 of the water/bbs out of the cone simply cover the end of the siphon hose and drain it back into the cone... rinse the cone out completely and it is ready to go for the next batch.... You should feed about 50% of the newly hatched bbs to your horses or your reef and then move the other 50% into the second container that was set up exactly the same way as the first, add 5 drops of selcon and 5 drops of Zoe liquid vitamins and aerate for 12-24 hours. To get them out do exactly the same thing you did with the newly hatched stuff and you can feed them to your fish or store them in the fridge at 4degrees C for upto 48 hours.. but I recommend using them asap.... hope this helps.... its alot easier to do it than describe it.
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