Hello all,
I've been meaning to write this for about a week and a half now, but haven't had the time. (briefly this is planting season here and I've spent most of my time dealing with seedling and such.)
But today dispite it being a great day to get some of the early spring project taken care of, I'm comming down with a sinus thing, and don't feel much like doing them.
So about a week ago the shrimp released her brood. Some lasted for 3 days before they all died, most made it through to stage 2 and some probably but not sure made it to stage 3. Stage 2 was easily seen with the naked eye, as the black eye dots on the babies moved out onto stalks. stage 3 is a bit harder, and I didn't put any of the babies under the microscope to see if it happened. I'm not surprized, as this was my first attempt, and would have been more surprized if any had actually made it to adult, However I learned many things from this tha I wish to share with everyone, so if anyone wishes to breed shrimp, they might be able to avoid some of these things, I was ill prepaired to have hatchlings
first and foremost, I didn't have the right foods ready. The shrimplings are about 2mm long, and of what I could find about raising them said that they fed theirs newly hatched BS that were less than 6hrs old. I tried hatching the BS and while that is easy enough to do, you need many containers to hatch them out with enough frequency to have a constantly available food source. Next time, I plan on trying de-capsulated BS, which can be fed w/o hatching, (availible from a LFS) and/or a fish fry food.
next problem. the hatching container was too small. recomendations were 40larve/L of water population density. with a 20L grow out chamber. my grow out chamber was only about 3L wich left me with about 80Larve/L.
make sure to seal the edges of the "windows" into the grow out chamber. I didn't do this as it looked like simple pressure would hold the cloth in proper possition, and as I was running out of time, I rushed this step. unfortunatly once in the water, the meshing, wrinkled a little, creating little pockets that trapped the babies in and crushed them.
Cover the grow out chamber, I didn't do this, but the quite conditions that make it good for shrimp larve, also make it good for dust to collect on the surface of the water. I'm so used to
surface skimming I never gave this a thought.
This one didn't contribute to the shrimp death, but to the
hair algea explosion in the main tank. I had hooked the grow out tank into my main system. The large amounts of food feed to the shrimplings, largely just passed though the screening, and ended up in the main tank. I had a good bloom for a couple day that ended when I stopped feeding the larve. A seperate hatching system seems to be in order.
Well, This is all for now.
chris
