So much wrong information!!!! The best advice was to "seed your fuge & tank with Copepods and Amphipods". You can also add other life forms like gammarus and mysids for two.
While it's extensive, the most complete site for artemia (brine shrimp) information is in the
Manual on the Production and Use of Live Food for Aquaculture. The artemia section is 4.0.
The brine shrimp will not breed in the refugium as it won't supply the necessary food they require, and, will get sucked up into the flow from the refugium to wherever it goes. They also cannot breed and survive in any tank where predation exists. You CAN however, establish a culture that will reproduce but it needs to be in it's own separate container. (I use 26g rubber maid pails)
However, waiting for reproduction will NOT satisfy the need some have for adult or juvenile brine so it's easier to hatch out and grow out whatever quantities you use, UNLESS you are going to use a very large culture for a reasonably small demand.
Brine shrimp do NOT need high salinity, and in fact, probably survive a greater range of salinity than just about any other salt water life forms.
It is INCORRECT to say that brine shrimp have little nutrition, but more correct to say they lack a suitable fatty acid profile. The protein levels of GSL produced artemia have protein levels of close to 60% and slightly above when measured in DW%, more than most other foods we feed our tanks.
When the nauplii hatch from the cysts, they still have their egg sack for a little time. A big problem though is that they don't all hatch out at the same time, and some will be hatching about the time others are near depletion of the egg sack so they really need to be enriched for use with fry.
For this reason, it's better to decap or sterilize the cysts and then hatch them out.
Once hatched, siphon them off and rinse before putting them in clean water (same s.g.) and let grow out for a day until they reach the second Instar stage where they now can feed.
At this point they can be enriched to their maximum by adding enrichment to the culture for two twelve hour stages with new water and enrichment for each of the two stages.
After one stage they will be gut loaded, but after two, the enrichment will already have begun being assimilated into the body, making them even more nutritious.
Raising brine in low density cultures can be accomplished fairly easy, but to grow them out in any meaningful density is work that usually requires some experience to get it right.
For anyone interested, you can see my write up that I have at
Raising Brine Shrimp to Adult written after about the first decade of my nearly two decades of raising, feeding selling artemia.
