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? 😂
These guys are progressing faster than what I see documented in the German breeding video. I included a pic of my phone held up in front of their day 30 clip.
We have little pleopods on these babes now! 😍 There’s also blue and brown ones now and they’re grazing on all surfaces and are not so instantly drawn to the light. I have to leave it on for 5 minutes or so before feeding to get the group of them to come forward.
My tank is definitely pea soup so I can’t even see the back of my tank, but it’s super cool seeing them grow so fast in such a short time.
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!
One month ago today, on September 3, I woke up to hundreds of microscopic Vampire Shrimp larvae floating around the tank after DJ VampEZ released her brood overnight.
By about 9:30 that morning, I had them moved into saltwater and had officially committed myself to a project I had researched a lot but had absolutely no real-life experience doing. 😂
And now here we are.
Day 30.
I still have roughly 40–50 larvae active in Baby Rave Cave 2, and they are very obviously not the same tiny little specks I collected that first morning.
They’re larger. Faster. Their bodies are more developed. I can see much more structure in the abdomen and tail, more complex appendages, and that bright yellow/orange digestive tract running through their translucent bodies after they’ve been eating.
Some are spending more time grazing along the bottom and occasionally on the glass now too, which seems much more deliberate than what I saw in the early days. They’re still spending plenty of time swimming in the water column, so I’m watching all of those behavior changes closely.
Feeding right now is mostly live phytoplankton throughout the day, with very tiny amounts of powdered shrimp food once or twice daily. I’ve also started culturing my own Tetraselmis, which I’m really excited about because I want live phyto to be the foundation of their diet going forward.
The tank is still around 1.020 specific gravity and 79°F, with aeration and no traditional filter.
Have I done everything perfectly?
Absolutely not. 😂
I had ammonia issues early on in the smaller 3.5-gallon tank. I didn’t even have live phytoplankton until around Day 5. I’ve made adjustments as I’ve learned. We survived the Great Air Freshener Incident. And I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time staring into this tank with a flashlight trying to figure out whether microscopic shrimp are eating, molting, stuck, resting, dying, or just being microscopic shrimp.
But somehow, a month later, they’re still here.
The only successful captive-rearing account I’ve been able to find for Atya gabonensis took roughly 3.5–4 months to get larvae through the full larval period and into juvenile shrimp, so I know we are still very early in this.
Day 30 is nowhere near the finish line.
But it feels like a pretty big checkpoint.
Since my vamps have bred so many times, I’d talked about attempting to raise previous releases. I researched it, asked questions in groups, and got plenty of “that’s impossible” responses 😂 but also a lot of encouragement from the more adventurous shrimp keepers.
I got more serious about trying with the brood before this one. A local fish friend had even brought me saltwater to help with my mission, so I’d been staring at that unused 5-gallon jug for a few months like, okay… eventually I’m actually going to do this.
PS: Amy Chiu, you’re a freakin’ amazing human and fish/shrimp keeper. 🤩🙌
But thinking about it and actually waking up to hundreds of microscopic floating shrimp and saying,
“F-it. I’m gonna do THIS.”
…are two completely different things. 😂
And today I’m looking at 40–50 growing little Vampire Shrimp larvae thinking… we’Rev actually still doing this. 😂
Happy one month, Baby Rave Cave. 🦐🖤