Not quite a breeding journal: Harlequin Shrimp

D

Daulken

So, I bought a bonded pair of Harlequin shrimp a few months ago and had always had the intention of eventually trying to breed them. At the time I thought no one had ever been successful breeding them to adults in captivity, but have recently learned that it's been done at least once. Still, not something a lot of people have had much success with.

I came home on Saturday night/Sunday morning and found that I had about 1,000 baby shrimp though and...being more than a little drunk, decided I was going to go ahead and see how long I could keep them alive.

My main tank (in this context) is a Fluval Spec 5.6 gallon with about a quarter inch live sand substrate with 2 small pieces of live rock and the harlequin shrimp. There is no other livestock in this tank, it exists for them only.

So, at 3:00 AM on Sunday, March 6th I came home to find they had finally spawned the eggs and I took some video. I went ahead and dosed the aquarium with a fair amount of phytoplankton but didn't turn the filter off. In fact, I put a very fine filter sock in front of the intake just so I wouldn't have to fish a ton of dead baby shrimp out of the filter the following morning. Needless to say, my "hundreds" of shrimp from the night before turned into about a hundred. As expected, I had nothing setup for them and originally hadn't planned on even trying to save the first batch...see again, above reference to alcohol.

This video is upside down, I realize. Oops. It shows hundreds and hundreds of the little guys floating around in the tank.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHeMteMwA0c&feature=youtu.be
 
On day 2 (in the afternoon, so pretty close to 32 hours after I initially found them I setup an additional "grow out" tank for them.

I bought a 2.5 gallon glass tank with no substrate, put a sandstone in there and an additional heater I had laying around. (I did mention I don't actually expect this to work right?)

I filled the tank halfway with freshly made up saltwater and then siphoned out as many of the little guys as were left, at this point I'm guessing there's maybe 75 or so left.

I feel 4 times daily, twice I dose with phytoplankton, and, after buying some, I feed the other two times a day with a quarter of a block of baby brine shrimp.

I took a picture on day 2 BEFORE I moved them into the new tank, I didn't take a picture on day 2 after I had moved them.

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When I got home from buying all of the stuff I needed I was without electricity (normal power outage) so instead of floating at the top of the tank, they were all bunched up against the side (the side where the window is). I lost a LOT of them because of this, but still managed to save about 75 going into the new tank. These numbers are very rough estimates, actually counting them would require some method I don't have yet...it would be like trying to count fleas on a black cat.
 
Day 3 they are still going strong. I did about a 50% water change today in keeping with everything I know about how difficult it is to raise shrimp...for those who haven't read up on it, a summary:

Basically you have to add a ton of food to keep the food density up so that the little guys can eat more or less by just bumping into food as they mostly float around with the current and their movements are pretty much limited to "move toward light" and nothing else. Doing this trashes your water quality, so you have to do daily water changes. I'll leave it at that because there's a lot more information, but right now I just want to document this and I don't have time to get into more details, the information is out there if anyone wants to dive more into it.

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Have I mentioned these things are a PITA to take pictures of? I'll work on getting better but I'm more focused on keeping them alive than making pretty pictures. If and when they get bigger and just keeping them alive isn't a nearly full time job I'll work on getting better at taking pictures.
 
Rough start, but you're heading in the right direction. You might want to put your bubble stone underneath your heater just to gently keep larvae from hanging out there too close and getting cooked.
 
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