My Shrimp Breeding Experience

[pacalan]

Since there has been some interest on the subject, here's some information about the process I went through.

First off, I should say that there are a couple of websites that are quite detailed and full of a lot of useful information.

http://caridina.japonica.online.fr./English/Elevage.htm
http://mikes-machine.mine.nu/breeding_yamato.htm

The second one was put together very well, but I haven't been able to access it for a long time. Either one will give a good idea of the steps involved and some insights on the requirements of the larvae.


So, on to my story...

I suppose that I should start at the beginning. I've had amano shrimp for a few years, with about a dozen males and two females who are constantly producing eggs, but I was never particularly interested in raising them. They were fun to watch, but that's about it. It wasn't until I found that one of my vampire shrimp was a female and started carrying eggs that I became more interested in raising shrimp. They are absolutely fascinating creatures. Anyway, their egg cycle is lot slower than either the amano or bamboo, of which I had purchased earlier this year, one female and two males. As I found out, there has been as many problems with raising bamboo as there have been with vampires. So, I started looking into this whole process of raising shrimp larvae, wanting to figure out what it takes to be successful with the bamboo, so that I might have a chance with the vampires. Since I'm new at this whole thing, and wanted at least some chance of success, I decided to give the amano a go as well, especially since my bamboo and amano have roughly the same carrying and releasing egg cycle. The more larvae, the more chance of some kind of success, right? That was my thinking, anyway.


That's just some background. I'll get into the nuts and bolts of it a bit later. Hope I haven't bored you so far. It should get more interesting in the next installment.

[RoseFishWatcher]

I have my fingers crossed for your vampire and bamboo success!

[pacalan]

Thanks! Also, thanks for commenting. It's good to know that someone is actually reading this.


My first tank was a ten gallon, which I still had lying around. I decided to clean it up and use it for the saltwater that the larvae would be needing. According to the couple of sources I stated, it was mentioned that a salinity lower than 30 ppt would result in a lot of larval loss, with 34 seeming to be optimal. That is where I kept the salinity when I first set it up. It's a pretty bare tank, being just a heater, small airstone, and a thermometer, as well as an air pump for the airstone. Oh yeah, it also has the hood and light tstrip. I also taped black posterboard on all four sides of the tank. This is to keep the larvae swimming in the center of the tank as well as enclose the light, since it's on 24 hours a day. It sheds enough light during the night, with the little bit escaping from the cracks between the posterboard. I got used to the dim light while I'm trying to fall to sleep now, thankfully. Anyway, The heater is set to 74-76 degrees, and the flow from the airstone wasn't too strong, but enough to show movement on the water's surface.

One thing I didn't exactly think of in the beginning was preparing a hatching tank for the shrimp to release their larvae in. The larvae are attracted to light, so I was just planning on shining a light in my main tank, thinking that I could just collect them from there. Needless to say, that didn't work so well. I didn't realize that with my fish, powerheads, and filter, there's no way the larvae would be able to survive, let alone swim on their own accord. I didn't want to jump into setting up another tank. I had already doubled my number of tanks by setting up the saltwater one. What I ended up buying was a plastic container that has a lip to hang on the rim of the tank. Basically, it's like what they use to put fish in at the store, when they are netting them from the tanks. It was big enough for either the bamboo or amano, and it kept the shrimp in the same water that it came from. After a half hour struggle of trying to capture the one pregnant bamboo, I finally was able to put her in the plastic container so that she could release her young. That totally freaked her out, flying around the little container. She wouldn't stop either. I ended up having to turn out every light in the room, in an effort to calm her down. It must have worked because in the morning, she was sitting on the bottom with a whole swarm of little larvae darting around her. That was one of the coolest things to see. Still afraid of her getting worked up again, possibly hurting herself and/or the larvae, I headed out to get a hatching tank first thing, even before I dared to turn on any lights. The hatching tank was about as sparse as the saltwater one, with just the bare essentials. I tranferred the container with the bamboo and her larvae over to there for her to release the rest of her eggs. About this time, I noticed one of the amano's eggs were about ready to hatch as well, so I scooped her out and put her in the hatching tank as well. If nothing else, I figured she could keep the bamboo company, who still was a bit on edge.

More to come.... It feels like I'm writing a book here. There's bound to be some useful knowledge for people somewhere in these ramblings though. I hope so, anyway.

[Que]

I'm reading every word. Keep it coming.

Q

[msjinkzd]

me too! this is very interesting.

[pacalan]

By the middle of the day, the bamboo was still acting weird, not moving much or opening up her fans at all. I figured the lenghty battle of trying to net her combined with the night in solitary must have stressed her out pretty bad. So, I put her back in the main tank, even though she hadn't released the rest of her eggs. I would much rather have a live shrimp than a few more larvae that may or may not survive this process. On a side note, it took a while for her to get back to her old self, but after a few days, she was mostly back to normal.

That night, I noticed the amano doing something intersting. She systematically scraped the eggs out of each section of her swimerettes, pulling each egg grouping out, manipulating them with her mouth and tossing the bunch aside. I had always wondered if the females do indeed drop their eggs or if the larvae hatched while she was still carrying them. I can't say for sure if this behavior is normal, but it was sure interesting to watch. Some of the egg clusters did hatch, but there were others which never did and grew fuzzy, at which point, I removed them. Having no more eggs, I put the amano back into the main tank, leaving the hatching tank full of little larvae floating in the water underneath the light. Not knowing how strong of swimmers they are, I kept the flow from the airstone pretty low, just enough to provide a bit of surface agitation, but not enough to create much of a current.

So, the big question comes up. How long do they need to stay in freshwater, before they make the switch to salt? Consulting the various websites, it seemed as though 3-7 days should work. I suppose this is where the shrimp's original proximity to the ocean comes into play. Obviously the closer to the ocean they are, the quicker they need to move to saltwater. On the third day, I used a turkey baster to siphon out a few larvae to put in the saltwater tank. I was a bit worried when I read that the larvae did not need any sort of acclimation, but could withstand the saltwater directly. It's true though. Sure they flicker about a bit when they hit the salt, but soon enough, the larvae are floating about as though nothing has really changed. I've never noticed any immediate larval loss during this transfer. The next day, having seen the larvae still alive in the saltwater, I started transferring more of the larvae over. I want to say that the number of total larvae ranged between 75-100. Rather than moving them all at the same time, would move about a dozen or two on any given day so I could get a better idea if they were still surviving or not. It did seem as though not all of them were making it. The numbers didn't completely die out, but there may have been a 30% loss with each transfer. I initially thought that it might be something of natural selection, where the stronger survive, and losses should be expected.

When I started putting the larvae in saltwater, I also began feeding them with DT's live marine phytoplankton. They certainly reacted to the stuff, and using a magnifying glass, you could see their stomachs were a bright green. So, it was definitely a good sign that they were eating.

To be continued...

[vidiots]

A few months back I tried about 4 or 5 times to breed the amano shrimp and had no success. The longest I was able to keep a batch of Zoes alive was about 40days. They were not growing I assumed food must be the issue. I tried feeding them DT's phytoplankton, bakers yeast, liquid fry food. None of them seemed to help.

I think I was doing the saltwater xfer at about 5days.

I never had any mature to the point of xfering them back to FW.

The nice part was that my female amano was with eggs about ever 4 or 5 weeks which gave me multiple "do-overs".

I finally gave up on it after multiple failures. Hopefully you won't make the same mistake(s) I did what ever they were.. I never did figure out why it wasn't working. I thought I was following the instructions on those sites to the letter.

I am interested in how things go, so please keep posting what happens..

Here is a link to some of the discussions I had with other AC members about it.

http://www.aquariacentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=86562&highlight=Breeding+Amano+Shrimp (http://www.aquariacentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=86562&highlight=Breeding+Amano+Shrimp)

[thebullit]

very interesting.

[pacalan]

Well, that's weird. The last installment from 09-30 is missing, as well as a response to vidiots.... Oh well, I'll try again.

I'm sorry to hear of your difficulties. At this point in the story, it still involves the first batch of larvae, which did not survive. I too had been following the sites as closely as I could. Some changes were made with the following batch which has and still is producing baby shrimp.

Having only been through one batch of survivors, I can't say how long they should remain in a larval state, but 40 days seems long to me. Mine started switching over around day 25. Each day since then I pull new ones out of the saltwater for acclimation to fresh. What's interesting is that there is quite a size difference between the larvae. The biggest ones still have not made the switch to the shrimp stage yet, only the smaller ones. I'm not sure why that would be.

[Dwarf Puffers]

I just had an idea that, for me, is unusually intelligent (:thm:). Didn't you mention somewhere that you couldn't tell the bamboos from the amanos? Perhaps the amanos, being shorter lived and smaller, are the smaller, quicker developped ones, and the bamboos the larger, developping ones?

[pacalan]

Things were going well, with the larvae now in saltwater. I kept checking the hatching tank to transfer any stray ones that took a bit longer to hatch. I can't begin to explain how difficult it was to figure out much food they should be given. It's tough to say how much they need to eat, compared to the amount of phytonplankton there is in solution. I ended up doing 4 or 5 eyedroppers full of DT's throughout the course of a day. As the week went on, the water started taking on a murky, green coloration, making it difficult to see the larvae floating around. That weekend, I decided to do a couple of small water changes to try and clear it up, making sure to keep the salinity and temperature of the new water the same as the tank's. I can't say that they really helped the condition any, but I felt better by doing it. Some articles state that the larvae aren't that particular about water conditions though. I really just wanted to be able to see them again. During the second week, I accidentally left out the bottle of DT's, and it had gone warm before I discovered it. (It needs to be refrigerated) I picked up a new bottle and continued as before with the feedings. The larvae did not react to this new bottle like they had before, but they still seemed to have the green inner tint, so I figured they were still eating. As the week went on, the number of larvae dropped severely, with fewer and fewer viewings of larvae as they passed by the front of the tank, which was the only time you could actually see them because of the green water. At the end of the second week, I called the batch a loss. Luckily enough, both the amano and bamboo's eggs were about ready to hatch, so it was a good time to start everything over. Not the least of which was to clean that green mess of a saltwater tank.

So, you have to ask yourself what went wrong. Was there was something missing from second bottle of food that the larvae liked? Should I have started them on a different type of foodd? Could the water changes have been a bad idea? Should the salinity have been different than what it was? I think one problem might have been that the airstone was providing a bit too much of a current in the water. The larvae could certainly move of their own accord, but they seemed to ride the current more than move about on their own. As for salinity, it's tough to say. If they can last a week at those levels, why would it be a problem the next week? The sites state that 30-34 ppt is optimal for the larvae, but they do recommend experimenting for yourself to see what works. There are so many variables about so many different things. About the only thing I knew was to keep the temperature the same.

[pacalan]

I just had an idea that, for me, is unusually intelligent (:thm:). Didn't you mention somewhere that you couldn't tell the bamboos from the amanos? Perhaps the amanos, being shorter lived and smaller, are the smaller, quicker developped ones, and the bamboos the larger, developping ones?

I certainly hope they are bamboo larvae, but I'm kind of doubting it. I learned some information about bamboo larvae recently, stating that they are considerably smaller than the amano and take a great deal longer to develop. I do have some really small larvae floating about, which I'm hoping are bamboo. So, you may be half right... You may be all right.... :grinyes: I really couldn't say until they do develop.

[pacalan]

Since the first batch was a failure and I was starting over, I decided to change pretty much everything that I had done the first time around. Contrary to the the sites mentioned previously, there have been studies that have shown the process to work with a salinity of just 17 ppt. Since 34 didn't work, I split the difference, putting the saltwater at around 25 ppt.

I also picked up a much smaller air stone that produces smaller bubbles. The effect is that it does not create much movement in the water, unless the larvae swim directly in the bubbles path. There is some surface agitation, but not a whole lot. Now the larvae were free to swim however they felt.

The food was also changed to Kent's Phytoplex. I wasn't sure if the larvae would even be interested in it at first, but they have been attracted to it from the start of this batch. The nice thing about this food is that I have not encountered the greenwater from before. Even without having done any water changes, the water is still clear enough to see everything in the tank.

Having a tank filled with water, you come to expect insects to occasionally find a way in and die. Truth be told, I didn't bother taking them out. This actually turned out to be a good thing. Around the middle of the third week, I happened to notice one of the larvae feeding off of a dead insect, landing on it, pulling off a chunk, and swimming away with it. This made me start thinking about whether or not they needed a change in their diet, or at least something a bit bigger for them to eat. I tried various foods, none of which interested the larvae in the least. One thing I did pick up was some Cyclop-eeze. This had an interesting effect. The larvae clearly responded to the scent of it, but I did not notice them eating the stuff. However, after a couple of days, the larvae started displaying more red in their shells. I don't know if they were eating the Cyclop-eeze when I wasn't watching them or indirectly ingesting it through the water. Whatever the case, it was an amazing week, with the larvae growing at a more substantial rate, and by the end of that week, the first shrimp started showing up. I never fed them that much of the Cyclop-eeze, just a very little bit at a time. The majority of the food was still the Phytoplex, which they still seem to respond to.

Once the shrimp started showing up, I siphoned them out with a turkey baster and put them in a tupperware container to float in the hatching tank. The acclimation is pretty straightforward, taking out a bit of the saltwater and replacing with fresh. I'm not sure how much of a salinity change the shrimp can withstand at a time, so I've been taking it pretty slow, using an eyedropper. On average, the process has been taking me about 4 days for each batch of shrimp from any given day, with small water changes three times a day.


So, there you have it. I can't say that this process will work for everyone. I don't even know if it would be successful for me again. I'm just so happy to see these baby shrimp this one time.

If anyone wants me to elaborate on anything, feel free to ask.

[soobie]

That's so cool. Good job!

[vidiots]

Now that others are also breeding them, I wish I was still trying, however my female is nolonger producing eggs and at the moment I have converted my setup for breeding cherry shrimp which require no effort on my part and they also do a pretty good job on tank algae.

[gupman]

How long after seeing berried does it take for the female to drop the eggs(larvae)?
Congrats by the way