I was convinced all of my sea monkeys had died, what happened?

Question

On the fifth day of my sea monkeys new life they had all (i assumed) died. The night of their fifth day, all of them were laying at the bottom of their tank, not moving. I tried to shake the tank and stir the water, but still none of them moved. I never got around to emptying the tank, and three days later my roommate informed me that their were still sea monkeys in the tank. What happened? I was convinced there was no life in there!!!

Answer 1

They hatch new eggs continually, or maybe the adults were not all dead.

Answer 2

Did they die just after you fed them.

This is a common problem where for some reason the oxygen levels were already low. Perhaps you had not oxygenated the water enough? Some times the balance of the food and eggs can be a little off in the particular packet that you got, which is obviously very unfortunate if this were the case. Lastly were the conditions where they were set up overly hot or to cold? Seamonkeys usually do very well when the temp is around 25 degrees Celsius rather than bellow say 20C or over 30C. All these problems I have just mention relate back to one very important thing. The level of oxygen in their water.

If there is extra food in the water that has not been eaten( it actually comes in the packet with the eggs) and bacteria has been building up already (perhaps form overly warm conditions or too cold where some may have already died) Or you have not been totally diligent with the manual oxygenation side of things or maybe even fed them to early ... then these things usually leads to a bacterial bloom. The bacteria also produce some toxins into the water that can harm the babies but the worst thing they do is consume all the oxygen!!!. What then follows is a crash in the population of moneys as they starve of the life giving gas. But sometimes if everything was not totally bad with the bacteria levels some monkeys will survive. These lucky ones make it because they are no longer competing with all their siblings for the limited supply.

So I guess you have been half lucky ;)

With the reminder of your crew, the important things to  consider are lighting, oxygenation and "no feeding!!!" them until that water has become crystal clear.

Lighting

lighting encourages a quick establishment of algae which I believe is an essential element to a happy health sea monkey or itsy bitsy sea dragon set up. It also provides lots of oxygen too, so the laborious task of manual aeration can be relaxed.

Temperature

The correct temperature takes the pressure of your baby sea monkeys as well as increasing available oxygen if you can bring it to about 25 C. When its to hot or cold they have to expend valuable oxygen to cope with the temperature difference of what they are most comfortable with.

Aeration

And lastly id recommend twice daily aeration at least until you can get a little algae to take over the job.

If the last of your sea monkeys do pass away all is not lost

I highly recomend a new product by Little Aussie products called Egg-Splosion that some how activates lost of unhatched eggs in your kit.

http://www.littleaussieproductsshop.com/...

I hope I have been of some assistance.