One minute, everybody’s peacefully grazing and minding their own business.
The next? Apparently we’re hosting the underwater Grand Prix, and nobody told me. 🏎️🦐
I swear these little goofballs have more energy than I do after three coffees.
Anybody else’s shrimp randomly decide it’s time for some high-speed laps around the aquarium? 😂
Some of you might remember u/shrimpshedmi’s post about the 3D-printable zoea trap we’ve been working on. With his help testing it and refining the design, I now have the print files available on my website! 🦐
Big thanks to u/shrimpshedmi for helping move this from a design on a screen to something being put to use with actual larvae.
You can find the files here:
Introverted Invertebrates — 3D Prints
If you print one and give it a go, I’d love to hear how it works in your setup. Feedback, photos, and ideas for improvements are all welcome. Hopefully this helps a few more of us tackle the larval side of shrimp breeding!
Been working on a dedicated 20 long for Atyoida pilipes, and this is V1.0.
The plan is to let the whole thing mature until roughly the end of November before anybody moves in. I’m currently working on sourcing the pilipes, so the exact move-in date depends a bit on when I can actually get a healthy group lined up.
I want the rocks, wood, glass, filter, etc. to have a proper head start growing all the gross little things that hopefully make filter feeders happy.
The basic idea is a stream-ish setup with a big rock/branch complex giving them a ton of places to perch at different heights and orientations in the current.
Still waiting on a couple pieces before I call the hardware side finished:
- A wavemaker will go on the right side and push flow across/through the rock and branch structure.
- the right side is also getting an HMF
The foam is on the way, so right now the tank is very much V1.0 / construction site edition. Then I can start playing with flow until I find something that gives strong feeding lanes without turning the entire 20L into a washing machine
I’m building the HMF myself with an airlift rather than using a conventional filter. This is my first time actually running a Mattenfilter, though, so does anybody here have experience with HMFs in filter-feeder tanks?
Particularly curious about flow through the foam, airlift sizing, maintenance, and whether anyone has combined an HMF with a directional wavemaker like this.
For now: lights on, temporary filtration running, and let it get old and dirty. 😂
Hopefully future residents: Atyoida pilipes — sourcing mission currently underway.
Curious what people keeping or breeding filter-feeding shrimp are using for suspended foods.
For anyone keeping species like Bamboo shrimp, Vampire shrimp, Atya, Atyopsis, Atyoida, etc.:
Do any of you currently use live phytoplankton as part of your feeding routine, or are you mostly using prepared/powdered foods?
And for anyone attempting to breed amphidromous species — would you use live rotifers if you could buy a healthy starter or ready-to-use culture instead of maintaining the culture yourself?
I run a small shrimp and live-culture operation in Ontario and I’m starting to sell some of my own cultures, currently including Tetraselmis chuii. I’m trying to figure out whether there’s actually a market for live feeds among filter-feeder keepers and breeders, rather than just assuming there is because they make sense on paper.
I’d especially be interested in:
Whether you’d buy phyto regularly or just use it to start your own culture
Whether live rotifers would be useful enough to purchase
What species you’d be using them for
Roughly how much you’d expect to use
Not meant as a sales post — mostly trying to understand what people in this niche actually want before I start producing a bunch of stuff nobody needs. 😂
P.S. — I’m also interested in freshwater live cultures, not just marine/brackish ones. If there are freshwater phyto, microfauna, or other live feeds you’d actually use for filter-feeders or larval rearing, I’d love to hear what they are.
Hey everyone,
I’m curious what other people breeding Amano shrimp are doing for live feeds, especially during the larval stages.
For those of you using live phytoplankton:
Do you culture your own?
Buy it from someone else?
Or mostly avoid live phyto altogether?
And a second question — rotifers.
If there were a reliable source where you could buy a healthy live rotifer culture rather than having to maintain one yourself, would you actually use them for Amano larvae?
I run a small shrimp/live-culture operation in Ontario and I’m just starting to sell some of my own cultures, currently including Tetraselmis chuii. I’m trying to get a feel for whether there’s actually demand among other Amano breeders for ready-to-use live cultures, particularly from people who want the benefits of live feeds without maintaining another culture system.
Not really trying to advertise here — genuinely interested in what everyone is currently doing and what you’d actually find useful.
Also curious how much phyto people go through during a typical larval run if you’re buying it rather than culturing it yourself.
Also few pictures from my white amano tank, because I love them and love sharing them
I’ve posted some of my other shrimp lately, so figured the wild-type Amanos deserved some attention too.
These are part of my Caridina multidentata founder colony. They obviously don’t have the crazy colour of Neocaridina, but the more time I spend watching Amanos, the more I appreciate how much variation and detail there actually is in them.
The translucent bodies, dots/dashes along the sides, different amounts of pigment, and the way their colour changes depending on the substrate/background are just really cool.
They’re also the animals that sent me furthest down the shrimp-breeding rabbit hole.
My long-term project with this colony is captive reproduction. Amanos hatch as free-swimming larvae rather than miniature shrimp, and those larvae naturally develop downstream in brackish/marine conditions before metamorphosing and eventually returning to freshwater.
So I’m currently building out a small larval-rearing setup around them — phytoplankton, rotifers, marine larval tanks, the whole ridiculous thing.
Several females in this colony have already been berried, so now it’s mostly a matter of getting the hatchery side of the equation dialled in.
Until then, I’m perfectly happy watching them spend twelve hours a day picking invisible shit off rocks. 😂
Caridina multidentata really are underrated-looking shrimp.
This is T-006, one of my Amano breeding tanks, currently holding 20 captive-bred “white” Caridina multidentata.
They’re noticeably paler than the more typical wild-type Amanos I keep in another system, which is part of why I’ve been keeping the two groups completely separate.
I’ve been spending more time lately just watching how they use the tank — rock surfaces, plant roots, sponge filters, shaded areas, open substrate, all of it. With 20 shrimp in 30 gallons, there’s usually something going on somewhere if I sit still long enough.
A few of the females have also been berried, so this group is part of the population I’m hoping to eventually work through the full larval cycle with rather than simply keeping them as a display/cleanup colony.
The “white” appearance is one of the things I’m especially curious about long-term: whether it remains consistent in captive-bred offspring, how much variation shows up within the group, and how they compare against my separate wild-type population.
For anyone who has kept pale/“white” Amanos before: did the coloration stay consistent as they matured and bred, or did you see a lot of variation?