Growing brine shrimp to full size and breeding them in a home enviroment is generally uch more trouble that it’s worth, and it’s much easier to just hatch the BBS as needed from commercially produced eggs.
Great question! You absolutely can keep a culture of brine shrimp, but you’ll run into some issues if you’re doing it for BBS to feed to fry.
Brine shrimp have a weird reproductive cycle; if the water parameters are decent, they lay a type of egg that hatches very quickly but is pretty vulnerable if something does happen to it before it hatches. When water conditions get real bad though, they do their best to lay a different type of egg before they die, one that can handle some truly crazy conditions (freezing, boiling, drying out, etc) and wait for the right time to hatch. The eggs you buy at the store come from this second method, which is why they still hatch after sitting on a shelf for months.
I’m sure there’s some literature out there on how to trigger the second kind of laying, but it’s not gonna be easy, and you’re almost certainly going to want to keep at least a few tanks dedicated purely to brine shrimp so you have backups if/when something goes wrong with a batch (after all, a “successful” batch of type 2 eggs generally kills all the parents in that tank). And on top of this, you’ll still need to be running brine shrimp hatcheries to hatch the eggs you collect. Personally that level of work is just not worth it for something I can buy quite cheaply.
On the other hand, if you don’t mind feeding a mix of all different sizes of brine shrimp (or you just want to culture them because they’re neat!) you can set up a self sustaining tank where they reproduce via the first method, I’ve seen several folks do it on YouTube. Just be aware that at that point it’s not really a fry food anymore, it’s a fish food with maybe the occasional fry-food-sized-baby-brine in it
If its for fry, go with Moina (adults are bigger than BBS, but young Moina are actually smaller).
If not for fry, go with daphnia, or scuds.
All freshwater, and easy to culture with nothing but green water.
oakey__ 
Growing brine shrimp to full size and breeding them in a home enviroment is generally uch more trouble that it’s worth, and it’s much easier to just hatch the BBS as needed from commercially produced eggs.
Great question! You absolutely can keep a culture of brine shrimp, but you’ll run into some issues if you’re doing it for BBS to feed to fry.
Brine shrimp have a weird reproductive cycle; if the water parameters are decent, they lay a type of egg that hatches very quickly but is pretty vulnerable if something does happen to it before it hatches. When water conditions get real bad though, they do their best to lay a different type of egg before they die, one that can handle some truly crazy conditions (freezing, boiling, drying out, etc) and wait for the right time to hatch. The eggs you buy at the store come from this second method, which is why they still hatch after sitting on a shelf for months.
I’m sure there’s some literature out there on how to trigger the second kind of laying, but it’s not gonna be easy, and you’re almost certainly going to want to keep at least a few tanks dedicated purely to brine shrimp so you have backups if/when something goes wrong with a batch (after all, a “successful” batch of type 2 eggs generally kills all the parents in that tank). And on top of this, you’ll still need to be running brine shrimp hatcheries to hatch the eggs you collect. Personally that level of work is just not worth it for something I can buy quite cheaply.
On the other hand, if you don’t mind feeding a mix of all different sizes of brine shrimp (or you just want to culture them because they’re neat!) you can set up a self sustaining tank where they reproduce via the first method, I’ve seen several folks do it on YouTube. Just be aware that at that point it’s not really a fry food anymore, it’s a fish food with maybe the occasional fry-food-sized-baby-brine in it
If its for fry, go with Moina (adults are bigger than BBS, but young Moina are actually smaller).
If not for fry, go with daphnia, or scuds.
All freshwater, and easy to culture with nothing but green water.
I got a couple Amano shrimp and they produce shrimplets all the time. My Betta and ember tetras love them for snacks.
Growing them to adults can be tough enough a lot of times.
Just hatch a batch and freeze them. Its cheaper and easier.