Last week, we received an email from a long-time customer asking what we thought about a brand of frozen baby brine shrimp she came across and how it’s different than our Frozen Jellyfish Food. So, we thought we’d write a blog post about it!
San Francisco Bay Brand makes great frozen food for fish! However, typical frozen brine shrimp is not the perfect meal for jellyfish. Here’s why:
The two foods on the right, “Frozen Brine Shrimp” and “Omega Brine Shrimp,” are adult brine shrimp—not baby. They will be way too big for jellies to ingest and can ultimately cause water quality issues since the jellies won’t be able to fully consume them. Adult brine shrimp are on average 8 mm in total body length, whereas baby brine shrimp (a.k.a. “nauplii”) are less than 0.4 mm — that’s 20x larger! Way too big for the moon jellies in your aquarium.
The food on the left, “Baby Brine Shrimp,” is the most optimal of the three since it’s actually BABY brine shrimp, but here’s why it shouldn’t be the only food you feed your jellies. It is straight baby brine shrimp. It’s not enriched, so there are no additional vitamins or nutrients that jellyfish need to be happy and healthy. They only have the nutritional value of 24 hour hatched nauplii, in which most of the nutrition comes from the egg sac. Moon jellyfish need more than the nauplii to grow and keep a strong, healthy bell shape. Therefore, we don’t recommend using this brand of frozen baby brine shrimp as a sole alternative to our Frozen Jellyfish Food, but it would be fine to use in a pinch!
How is our food different?
We use a specific enrichment formula that provides all of the necessary vitamins and nutrients for jellyfish. We’ve spent many years perfecting this formula and figuring out what jellies absolutely cannot live without in order to grow larger and stronger. We’re confident our Frozen Jellyfish Food is the best jellyfish food available today because it’s the same food we feed our generations of lab-raised jellyfish and it’s still used by many public zoos and aquariums across the country. It’s also one of the cleanest jellyfish foods. By “clean” we mean it does not turn your water cloudy or opaque when fed out. This is essential for jellyfish aquariums because since jellyfish are 96% water, you don’t want to feed anything that will foul your water quality.
Another key aspect to all jellyfish food is buoyancy. Jellyfish food should be neutrally buoyant, allowing it to stay in the water column as long as possible. Our Frozen Jellyfish Food is neutrally buoyant. This allows the jellyfish more time to grab the food and eat more of it before it either sinks to the bottom (negatively buoyant) or floats to the top and out the drain (positively buoyant).
If interested, you can find our Frozen Jellyfish Food on our retail website here.
Have any questions about feeding your jellyfish? Ask us via email at moonjellyfish.com@gmail.com.
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