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
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