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The global artemia cysts production has been traditionally dependant on the Great Salt Lake (GSL). While this resource has largely been sufficient in meeting the needs of the European aquaculture industry, new resources have been categorized and exploited over the last 10 years to help meet recent global shortcomings from the GSL production. This has lead to a more stable supply to the industry. In addition to this, high detail fingerprints of cysts are now performed by INVE to assess their suitability for shrimp or marine fish larval culture leading to specific grades and specialty strains to meet the needs and expectations of the industry.

The substitution of cysts within the hatcheries is a complex affair and needs to be taken into consideration with a number of factors, such as economic gain or loss, fry quality and consistency in output. In addition, certain other intrinsic aspects of production need to be respected such as larval management, weaning strategy, species etc.

European fry production has increased dramatically to approx 700 million fry and cyst consumption has decreased to almost 200kg per million from the heady days of >800kg per million. A number of different technologies & nutritional advances have been developed to achieve such a reduction. Current cysts consumption is on average 200/kg per million and  while a reduction of 75% is achievable today to 50/kg per million with existing diets, the net gain is not evident. Reduction to below 50 Kg/million has been shown to have either adverse effects on fry quality, uneconomical or infeasible on industrial scale irrespective of the diet technology utilized. Given that artemia production accounts for only approx 3% of production costs, efforts to further reduce this will have almost no value and invariably lead to increased cost associated with loss & instability within production .