Cleaner shrimp babies...

[jnarowe]

So I got in some cleaner shrimp and two of them had full egg sacks. I placed one in my fuge and the other in my QT. Today I spotted hundreds of planctonic shrimp! So I shut down the skimmer, power head, and HOB, popped in an air stone and fed a little phyto.

And what I need is some information from anyone who has successfully raised cleaner shrimp. Anyone have a good experience?

[ihopss]

I can't help you, but thas cool goodluck.

[demonsp]

Bummer the fish would have enjoyed them. Sorry i would think they would be fine with no preditors around and would eat them same as mom .

[Fish'InMN]

http://www.ifmn.net/nachzuchten/garn..._debelius.html
http://www.breedersregistry.org/Repr...94/scarlet.htm

http://archive.reefcentral.com/forum...ta+amboinensis
http://archive.reefcentral.com/forum...217#post373217

And the Grand Daddy of all rearing threads...
http://archive.reefcentral.com/forum...ta+amboinensis

Good luck Jonathan, it sounds like you might have to catch and remove them (larvae) the next time if you are at all serious about raising them.


Marty

[jnarowe]

Lance: That's not how it works at all. In fact, Mom will eat them given the chance and they have very delicate beginning stage life cycles.

Marty: Thanks for the links. I will read them all. Since this happened in my grow-out/QT tank, I just removed all the corals, shut down the skimmer and powerheads, and popped in an air stone set on low. I could get lucky!!

[Fish'InMN]

Yeah, it sounds like you have the perfect setup (or nearly so) already in place. If you could somehow provide a constant, minimal water change as one of the links mentioned, by pumping water in from your main sump/filtration system, then it sounds like you are well set.

Good luck!
Mart

[jnarowe]

My setup is not too bad, but I have a couple of aiptasia I need to pull out, and it has square corners...

My QT actually has a float valve feed from the main display, so all I have to do is filter out some water and allow it to refill.

[hybridgenius]

LUCKY.....

[jnarowe]

Pulled tha aiptasia and turned on a heater.

[aurora]

NICE... With them selling at $20-30 a piece, successful aquaculture would really help.

[Micki]

I would buy some from you!

[jnarowe]

well the odds of even one making it to adulthood are extremely thin at best. What I am going to do is keep the two adults I have control over in the fuge and fish them out when they have eggs. If I can get lucky on one of these attempts, and figure out how to replicate the conditions, maybe I could get something going. But really as a hobbiest, I just don't have the knowledge or equipment to tilt the odds in my favor.

I guess it comes down to how their life cycle is represented in their spawning method. Every 14 days an adult releases hundreds of eggs. So out in the wild, I would bet they are lucky to get one adult from each spawning, hence the constant egg releasing. It takes 10x+ the egg production period for a cleaner shrimp baby to settle out. The numbers are mind blowing when you think about it.

[Micki]

Pretty crazy for sure...

[jnarowe]

well at lights on this morning I had nearly 100% mortality, so that doesn't even qualify as an experiment. Barely a fart in a hurricane if you ask me.

[Micki]

Awwww...

[jnarowe]

Yeah well, the writing was on the wall, I had just hung a picture over it! I am going to rig up a better larvae tank and try it out again.

[scaryperson27]

cool. I hope you're successful in your future attempts. Are you going to carry on your experiment in this thread? If you make a new one can you remember to post a link here? It wouldn't be hard for me to grab an impregnated shrimp to test this out on. I already have a non-utilized 20g attached to my main system. I'm going to read everything myself.

[jnarowe]

Lots of good reading about this. I am going to try and devise a round tank with some better method of circulation and more reliable heating. Maybe a plant heating mat would work better and some sort of baffles to slow down the air bubbles a bit. Like the CO2 diffusers.

[32flavors]

Hydor makes a 7.5 watt plate like heater. It's actually for Betta bowls, but might work for you... A 3-gallon Eclipse, they're hexagonal, might work, as you could drill LOTS of holes in the siphon, cover it with foam--like 2 inches worth with filter bag material encasing the foam all the way around. The intake flow would be so diffused between all the holes and the foam that it might not draw the larva into the filter... The Eclipse style lid would also allow the plate style of the 7.5W Hydor to be placed in the cartridge bed so none of the larva would end up too close to it... ust some ideas...

[jnarowe]

not bad ideas. Thanks!

[Putawaywet]

I was semi involved with a 6 month attempt to rear these guys a couple years back when I was working down at LBAOP out here on the left coast.

I can tell you it was an incredibly daunting task filled with constant ups and downs. We were housing them in pseudo-kriesels, piggy-backed to relatively large display tanks that fed them with a constant supply of filtered water. Feeding consisted of varying species of live phyto cultures mixed with newly hatched artemia enriched with Super Selco. And in spite of having access to all the balls and whistles of a public aquarium, staff still couldn't make it happen. Best they got was a 6-8 week average with a few making it to double digits.

The biggest hurdle that you will face will be trying to indentify the environmental trigger that causes their metamorphesis (settle out) into their final stage of developement.

It will take a bit of trial and error but once you get things dialed in it's possible to keep relatively high numbers alive for multiple weeks. But I fear you will quickly come to realize (much as we and many others have) that in spite of your best efforts the larve will just keep cruising along until they finally burn themselves out waiting for that final morph.

Best of luck to you

Brett

[jnarowe]

Ouch.

[BeanAnimal]

Interesting thread. So if the triggers can be found then captive breading is very possible?

[Putawaywet]

Well, unless it is something we are just physically unable to replicate then I see no reason why not.

Don't give up hope Jonathan because as bleak as I might have painted the picture I suspect the answer will one day come from someone who tries something completely outside the box and combines that with a little bit of dumb luck.

But trying to re-invent the wheel at the hobby level obviously isn't working. I mean the standard squared off isolation tank with an airstone and several daily feeds of phyto and bbs has been done to infinitum and each and every time the outcome is always the same.

Right out of the gate you are dealing with planktonic larvae that are so fragile that just netting them is totally out of the question. Heck, just bouncing off the walls of the tank can cause enough damage that they are unable to feed. The very reason why we employed kriesels and turkey bastors. Then you have food and food concentrations. Being planktonic and lacking well developed appendages they can't really hunt per se, but more so drift along until they bump into a food source which they seem to readily latch onto. The wrong size food and too low a concentration and they starve, too much food and you have water quality problems, etc. And then there's lighting? Do they drift near the surface where they are exposed to sunlight, or down deeper in the shadows? And if they drift near the surface does sunlight somehow play an active role in their development or just provide a means for them to orient themselves. (If memory serves me we did note they were mildly phototropic) Then again, does prolonged exposure to UV cause them irreparable damage? They are an incredibly small animal that comes with far more questions than answers.

My honest advice if you want to go down this road is to try breeding peppermints, which for some reason, are way easier to rear out to adulthood. There is even a book out there that shows how the author did it using flake food. Then, once you have fine tuned your husbandry skills you can start transferring your efforts over to skunk/scarlet cleaners and see what you can make happen.

Regards, Brett

[jnarowe]

That's good advice Brett. I do have a lot of dumb luck following me around, as well as Mr. Murphy. It's a battle every day! :ee2: