First you will need your ingredients.
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When you have all of these items collected, you are ready.
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First you are going to fill the small jar halfway with water, and add the brine shrimp cysts you are decapping to it. Now would be a good time to go change water, read your email, feed your cultures, whatever. Have fun, because those eggs need to soak for about an hour. |
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Now that your eggs are good and soaked, it is time to add your bleach, but before you do that, there are a few other things you may want to get ready, because you want to pour the bleach off as soon as the eggs are ready. Put your filter in the funnel, and put the funnel in the large jar. There is a method to my madness. Simply put, the bleach CAN and HAS eaten through the weave of the filter on occassion. By draining into a container, you can save your decapped eggs if you are unfortunate enough to have this happen. If the filter does tear, it will drain into the container. You can use a baister to squirt vinegar if you are not finished neutralizing the bleach, to wash the remaining eggs off the filter and into the container. If you were finished, you can use water. Just put another filter in the funnel, and pour the cysts into it, into another container, just in case THAT filter breaks as well. If this should happen you will have to neutralize the bleach on the eggs again by pouring more vinegar over them. You will add about half the amount of bleach as there is water, or more simply put, there will be 50% water in your little jar, and 25% bleach. |
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Cap up the jar (did I say you need the lid?? Well you need the lid), and shake the mix up. You will see the color begin to change after about a minute, and it should completely change in less than 3 minutes. When the eggs are mostly orange, they are done. You will see that there are still white eggs, this is normal. You want to be sure you do not leave them in the bleach solution for too long, if you do, you will kill the eggs, and they won't hatch. Later this will not be a problem, because the babies will learn that orange blobs are food, whether they hatch or not. This is what fed my fry when I had a horrible vial of cysts with something like a 20% hatch rate. But by the time I had gotten to this vial, the babies knew what food was, and ate the eggs as well. Also, once they know they can eat the eggs, even if they aren't hatched, you will not have to hatch the eggs, just give it to them as is. If you do this, please make sure all of your babies are eating, some of he smaller ones may have trouble recognizing the decapped eggs as food. |
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When you see that your eggs are the right color, you are going to pour them into your filter. Then pour the vinegar into the little jar, and into the filter. Swish it around and get the eggs stuck to the sides out. Do this about 4-5 times. This amount should be sufficient to neutralize the bleach. |
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After the vinegar drains, you are going to pour about twice the amount of water into the funnel, again using the little jar as you did with the vinegar, about 8-10 jars full. I usually use a different large jar at this point, just in case the filter still wants to tear. If it does, and you are using a different container, you will not have to pour more vinegar, just water. You want to rinse them well, though at this point the bleach is dead, and any remainding chlorine will disapaite by the time they hatch. And any residual vinegar will be left in the hatching container, and so are of no danger to your fry. But it never hurts to be safe, rather than sorry. |
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Your cysts are now bleached, neutralized, and rinsed. You have officially decapped your eggs.
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There you go, though some have found it easier to simply buy decapusated hatchable brine shrimp eggs.
I will also include this
link to storing decapped eggs.
I have never done this, or even tried it, but I thought I would include it, in case the question came up.