Hatching Brine Shrimp

What you will need

1 - cheap air pump (alternatively, use an airline splitter and tap the air off your main pump)
1 - plastic bottle (e.g, the 691 mL or 500 mL bottle for Aquafina bottled water works well)
2 - pieces of airline tubing (the 1st piece, 2 feet long, and the 2nd piece, 1 foot long)
1 - piece of stiff tubing the same width as the airline tubing, cut to slightly longer than the bottle height ( I get the stiff tubing from PetSmart)
1 - baby nasal aspirator ($1.49 at Walgreens, for non-parents :) )
2 - cups or small containers
1 - brine shrimp net
1 - dark colored opaque bag
1 - flashlight or adjustable desk lamp (Optional)
1 - syringe or mini turkey baster ( I have a BugFarm stamped minibaster) (Optional)
1.5 - 2 bottle caps of salt (or follow the instructions that come with the brine shrimp eggs)
1 - Pinch of Epsom salt

Constructing the hatching setup

Take the bottle cap and make a hole in the middle just large enough to pass the airline through, but tight enough so the airline can't move freely.
On the side of the bottle cap top, make a really, really small hole.
The idea is to pump air in through the middle, so you need the smaller hole for air to get out.
Take the 2 feet of airline tubing and slide it through the cap hole so that the piece that would hang inside the bottle is really close to the bottom, but does not touch it.
Also connect the stiff air tubing to the 1-foot piece of flexible tubing. At the other end, cut the airline diagonally so that you get a bigger opening. This will be helpful when you get to the harvesting step.

Setting it up

Fill the bottle up to within 1 inch from the bottle top; if you fill it to less than that, your brine eggs will splash on the sides and not hatch; if it's more than that, you'll lose some of the mixture through the cap holes.
Add the salt (for the 691 mL bottle, you would add 2 bottle caps full of salt; for the 500 mL bottle, it would be 1 cap and a half; When you measure the salt, do not top it off, just use whatever can be contained in the cap),
Add a pinch of Epsom Salt (which can be cheaply obtained at your local grocery or drug store) and the eggs; I usually put all of this on a piece of paper folded in half, and then pour it all into the bottle.

(Don't use the cap with the holes in it to do your measuring!)

Add all this to the bottle, cap it and start the pump. If you have a lamp, stick the bottle under the lamp for better yield and quicker hatch time.

Collecting the brine shrimp

Turn off the pump and quickly remove the cap with the airline.
Take the dark colored opaque bag and place it on the bottle, only leaving a very small opening at the base of the bottle (maybe 1 cm tall opening)
(Optional) Redirect the lamp (or use the flashlight) to the base of the bottle and wait about 3 minutes for all the brine shrimp to "see the light at the end of the tunnel". Unhatched eggs and shells will float to the top.
Important step here: Get the collection tube (the stiff tube with airline attached to it) and moisten the tube (you can do that in a tank or in the water that you use to rinse the BBS). That way, when you insert the tube into the brine shrimp bottle, the shells and bad eggs at the top will move away from the tube instead of sticking to it and ending up at the bottom of the bottle
Now remove the bag and insert the tube up to the bottom of the bottle
Place the brine shrimp net over a cup
Use the baby nasal aspirator to kickstart the siphoning of the brine shrimp from the bottle into the net (be quick so that you don't suck the brine shrimp into the nasal aspirator . . . (See where the diagonal cut you made to the airline helped ? :-)
Once you have gotten enough brine shrimp out of the bottle, (or once you have gotten all of it), pinch the siphoning tube and remove the whole thing from the bottle.
If you need to bubble the whole thing some more for a second feeding, add the water that was filtered out from this collection (brine shrimp are in the net now) to the bottle, recap and restart the pump.
Rinse with water until the cup is full
Then go to the second cup and turn the net inside out and rinse again.

I like to let the BBS sit in freshwater for 2 or 3 minutes so some of the salt in their body leaches out, but not longer than that since after that they start to burst (damn osmosis effect!)

Feed as you please with the minibaster/syringe or by pouring the shrimp into the tank directly (I have shaky hands from all the booze and can't trust myself to pour :-) . . .

Extras and what have you

I place the bottle in between some tanks for stability. To reduce the impact of shaking on the tanks, I put bubble wrap between the tanks and bottle
Sometimes you hatch a lot of eggs and the layer of shells on the bottle top is just too thick for it to be penetrated smoothly even by a moist tube. If this is the case, when you moisten the tube, pinch the airline so that a few drops of liquid stay in the stiff tubing. Then when you want to pierce the layer of shells floating at the top of the hatching bottle, release the drops of water from the tube first, then insert the collection tube through the hole that the drops make in the layer of shells.
The setup is amazingly silent!
I sell predrilled bottle caps for $49.99 plus tax :-)
I drill the caps with the blade on a Swiss Army folding knife that is on the other end of the beer opener, close to the attachment ring; this blade looks like a totally oversized sewing machine needle; it even has the hole in it. I have never found any other use for it other than making holes in caps for brine shrimp hatching.

OK, it sounds a lot worse than it really is. I've tried other small scale methods, but this seems to work best for me.

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