"Jumbo" shrimp quandry...

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Skippy

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Aug 22, 2000
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I have a side tank that I usually use for quarentine and holding. One day I picked up about 30 ghost shrimp as feeders for my severum and some other larger fish I have.

I dropped them into the Q tank and figured to feed them out over time.

This all went well. until I go in there and hiding in some decorations in the tank were... I kid you not... a small group of 2-3.5" long shrimp!

Is this normal growth rate and size for a ghost shrimp? Admittedly this apparently happened over a month or two.

At this point they are actually nipping at the smaller fish in the tank. Which I find an amusing "reversal of the whip" on them for eating all their breatheren.
 

tomm10

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Oct 15, 2003
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I have to think that what you have there are some stowaway crayfish. Some of them I've seen look a lot like ghost shrimp so they could be mistaken for them in their youth but I've never heard of a ghost shrimp getting too much bigger than an 1" or 1.5" The fact that they're nipping at other fish just further supports the idea. Shrimp don't really nip at anything IME.

Tom
 

Skippy

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Aug 22, 2000
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Nope, he just scavenges the spirulina flake I put in there for the current residents (Some Paradise Gourami).

There are a couple other survivor shrimp in there, but he's definitely the alpha among them .. although not sure of gender...
 

Traci

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Jun 27, 2003
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No, it's a shrimp.

Crays don't really resemble shrimp at all, and the only crays that have that opaque quality to their carapace would be one of the Procambarus cave species from Florida like P. milleri, and those are both rare and expensive. So you probably just got some other type of shrimp.
 

kikuchiyo

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May 9, 2004
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That guy's gotten huge, so he's probably safe, but "paradise gouramis" (really paradise fish, related to, but not a gourami) tend to make meals of shrimp quite quickly.
 

RTR

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Oct 5, 1998
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It looks like a Macrobrachium species - there are hundreds of them so tighter ID is all but impossible. Those long arms are dead giveaway.

Adult size can vary tremendously, from what you have now to over a foot, depending on species and housing. If you are really lucky it is one of huge guys:

http://southcenters.osu.edu/aqua/intro/sld013.htm

Then you can have an impressive specimen in a 50-75, and for the cost of a Ghost. A local store had them recently for ~$15.

Many of them require salt for breeding, but the adults do fine in any moderately hard slightly alkaline water.
 
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