About Aquabuy

We are a bunch of guys who create ecommerce websites and happen to like aquariums. Some of us have marine tanks, some tropical and some planted. Our interests cover the gamut of aquarium creatures, from planted nature aquariums to breeding clown fish. This hobby has overflowed into the office, which now has 4 tanks, and another sitting on a desk empty.. waiting.

Sufficient to say we enjoy our fish and we love keeping them happy and healthy. This is where brine shrimp come into the picture. Live food for home (or in our case, office) aquariums is not exactly easy. There are a number of options but most have draw backs. Microworms need to be continually kept in a bucket of smelly porridge. If you decide to neglect them they eventually die and you will have to source more live stock, not exactly an easy task. Microworms are also very small and only suitable for small fish and fry. Another option is the lowly mosquito wriggler. These make an excellent live food. Since we live in Australia malaria is not a problem, however for other countries it is. Also unless you pay close attention to their water source and harvest wrigglers frequently, you may end up with a mosquito problem at your next BBQ. Finally mosquitios are only viable for over the summer period, at least in Australia. In parts of the world where it is an option year round, malaria may be a factor that detracts heavily from going down this path.

One of the larger types of live food available to aquarists are other, generally smaller fish. Guppies and live bearers typically fill this role. They are great but there are possible drawbacks. You may not feel comfortable feeding small, alive fish to your larger fish. They are not suitable, even as new borns, to feed to smaller fish and fry. Finally the setup, expenditure and outlay is more involved than other, non-fish based live foods. You will need another aquarium, which takes up space and time.

All these live food sources are great and all of us have used them in our aquariums at one time or another. However they all share one problem - you have to continually use them/maintain them in order to have them.

So even with these, and other live food that is available, the ability to store and use whenever you need or want is very limited. Almost all live foods for aquarium fishes cannot be stored in a viable state long term and need to be maintained. This presents a problem as many hobbyists may want occasional live food to supplement their feeding regime or when they have an occasional batch of fry.

What if there was a storable live food that can be used occasionally - or more often if you desired? Well there is and it happens to be one of the earliest live foods used in the aquarium industry, brine shrimp. Brine shrimp are why we started Aquabuy.