by Ng Boon Ping, Aquarist at the S.E.A. Aquarium
Have you recently stopped to think about the prawns you ate? About how nutritious they are?
Daily feed at S.E.A. Aquarium
Here at the S.E.A Aquarium, crustacean such as prawns and shrimps make up a large portion of the marine animals’ daily diet.
To ensure that our marine animals receive the nutrients that they need, we enrich their feed.
Enriching food is the process of adding nutrients to the food. It could mean providing extra nutrients or replacing lost nutrients during processing, freezing and storage.
Acclimatising and enriching our live stock
Close up view of the mysids shrimps
Twice a week, we purchase a small amount of mysid shrimps from our supplier. These locally-caught mysid shrimps are then acclimatised with the sea water that we have here in the S.E.A Aquarium.
Mysid shrimps are kept here to acclimatise with the sea water at S.E.A. Aquarium
The streaks that you see are actually mysid shrimps. Look at how much there are!
As these crustaceans are really small and delicate creatures, the acclimatisation process is very important to ensure that they don’t die before they are enriched.
Once they are comfortable in our tank, we feed them with our enriched brine shrimps. The brine shrimps are enriched with SELCO(Self Emulsified Lipid Concentrate) that is rich in highly unsaturated fatty acids. We then allow these mysid shrimps to assimilate and digest the enriched brine shrimps.
Packing mysid shrimps into tiny zipper bags
Freezing mysid shrimp
The process of freezing will kill any possible bacteria on the frozen food
Mysid shrimps soaking in concentrated vitamin C solution
Once a day, we defrost the enriched shrimps and soak them in vitamin solution before we feed them to our animals.
Who eats these enriched mysid shrimps?
Marine animals feeding on mysid shrimps
The biggest patron of these mysid shrimps are our lovely seadragons here at the S.E.A. Aquarium. We use a pump (?) to funnel the mysid shrimps into the tanks to entice them to feed on the shrimps.
Apart from our seadragons, we also feed them to our razorfishes, seahorses, pipefishes and other small or juvenile fishes; giving them a variety of food rather than a mono diet or same food every day.