Breeding Lysmata shrimp

its 2018 and i have found a successful way to breed Expensive Lysmata's

its 2018 and i have found a successful way to breed Expensive Lysmata's

Hi All. Firstly straight off the bat i would like to thank the members on this forum for the many great 'experiments' they have conducted on the popular yet very hard task that is breeding cleaner shrimp. For this Experiment i had used Skunk Cleaner better known as Fire Shrimp. I would have to say that (and i am being truth full) that i have had at least 100 out of a possible 300 larvae that have successfully settled and i Live in Australia so i sell these babies at $120 a pop on our version of craigslist!:uhoh3: yes i know what your thinking...this bloke is probably talking smack ahaha well guess what... whether you believe me or not has no impact on what i'm doing and what i've done, your opinion means nothing to me, i am the captain now (insert meme here...thats right its 2018 and memes are a thing now) I have had success with these guys on a supplyable scale in my 100G shallow and i'm over the moon:bounce3:
basically i'm going to go through a full run down on exactly how i did it so you can perhaps replicate it. All details of the setup will be posted over a weeks period when i have free time. I will tell you exactly what i did and how i did it. I didn't read any special books, i only read what you guys provided me on this site with your own experiences. so i owe this to you guys. also i have not read that silly book called how to train your shrimp or whatever. that is just a sales gimmick designed to suck up your money life alot of other products in this hobby, and if you think i'm lying , exactly how many cleaner shrimps have you been able to rear to adulthood with the help of that book???
I only read what you guys provided plus some old pieces of text about scientific research done in the late 90's on a possible settlement cue or cues for blood cleaners and similar species like the amb and the (more affordable) peppermint. I came across a very interesting piece of text in one of those articles. something that caught my eye regarding settlement cue. something no one thought of before and i was staring at my screen thinking im stupid because i did not pick it out before and it's not even hard to pick out. it's more common sense and i'm being serious. we were missing important details...in fact VERY VERY IMPORTANT DETAILS in the life of larval cleaners and about what causes them to settle in the ocean. they don't just drift the ocean forever, they are only considered plankton while they are drifting in the ocean in their larval state. (i cannot provide any more on this as the answer to this whole thing lies in what i just wrote about the drifting, that is the only clue you get unfortunately) the clue is in there i promise you. in that sentence i provided above. i just pray that you figure it out. you also gotta understand that i cannot give the answer to this as it is an untapped global market. not even scientists (to my suprise :bounce2:)have been able to figure it out...or perhaps they already know the secret and they were just keeping the secret for financial gain however i am actually a young student only 21 and this is now in fact my only cash cow. i have dedicated the last 12 months of my life to this and now it has paid dividends. so of course i will protect the secret. :fun2: ...at all cost lol.

also, dont get me wrong, when i first started i was like everyone else...."why TF are they always dying before settlement" i would always think. it took alot of time and ALOT of money. i spend about AUD$1200 on a custom make breeder tank with all the works. it was a huge 100G shallow. I mean it was LONG. it was about 4m long but only about 20cm high, so it was a looooong very shallow (as i call it) lol. i think giving larvae more space will assist in the survival of larvae and also assist the larvae with settlement. you need a lot of live rock pieces. small a huge piece of christmas LR and place up to 100 pieces in the tank. they shouldn't be touching each other. each shrimp larvae must have a home to go under when it has settled. (i know this sounds like a weird setup but the pics will explain everything) it quite complex however the BIGGEST MISTAKE i made was not building it myself. After seeing the tank finished i had really wished i had made it myself. it would of costed me about $400-$500 if i had and i would of saved close to $800 :headwalls::headwalls::headwalls::headwalls::headwalls::headwalls:
anyways i will post later this week. dont worry. all your questions about nutrition etc will be answered.
 
Hi Guys, thanks for you support. there are alot of secrets and myths about the breeding of this. all will be revealed, i know what i commented before....i said i would keep it a secret, but what is the point in that......im starting to realise that the conservation of marine life is more important than money to me and therefore from now on i will tell you exactly what i did and how i did it. i'm thinking about writing a short book explaining it since it is sort of hard to do so from a post on this site. there are way too many factors involved. for eg.
during my experiments with various batches of debilius, the blood cleaner, i found that i had the highest rates of larval survival with zero light in the tank....this is because i noticed that when i fed newly hatched artemia (fed on reef roids) to the larval shrimp the bbs were attracted to the surface of the water where the light penetrated....and the shrimp larvae however were struggling to get away from the light and were clustered in dark corners, hence they were malnourished. due to this, the shrimp became more and more stressed and eventually starved. IT TOOK ME ABOUT 3 MONTHS ALONE TO FIGURE JUST THIS BIT OUT....THAT IS HOW MUCH TIME I HAVE PUT INTO THIS.
now all my shrimp larvae are cultured in darkness...i guess that this mimics the natural environment that plankton are exposed to anyway, they drift the deep dark depths of the ocean until they are ready to settle. with all my experimenting my larval survival rate is only roughly 15% to 30%, on one occasion post larva state was completed in 48 days.
Since posting this i have dabbled in other crustaceans i am interested in, i am trying my gut out with mantis shrimps, i have a male and female living in the same tank, however i have not observed any signs of mating.

I have had monumental success with Pistol Shrimps of the Alpheus genus which is the only genus known to form a symbiotic pairing with the Oyster Crested Goby, which is a goby which is part of the same genus as the yellow watchman, the Cryptocentrus. i've had pistol shrimp larvae settle in just under 4 days and they grow QUICK and are easy to raise.
I regularly get 50-100 settled shrimp per month.

I haven't had any success nor have i even tried breeding the oyster goby however i do want to give it a crack since i think that there is a pretty penny to be made selling Pairs of the iconic Shrimp Goby pairs. i am already selling a lot of pistols each month, however if i can breed the goby i could make a pretty penny selling Shrimp Goby Pairs.

if you are trying to breed the first thing i would suggest is a tank with an aged sand bed. when i first started breeding i couldn't grasp why people always said to never run a filter and have a bare bottom tank. i'm not a scientist, but to me it seemed a lot of people were complaining that poor water quality was to blame for the death or gradual death of their larvae so it made a lot of sense to me to go with a aged sand bed in an aged tank and a small aqua one 75 Litre per hour hob filter with a filter sponge on the end. i have a very powerful air pump with an airstone right under the intake pipe of the filter. this prevents the larvae from being sucked into the sponge. so there is a strong current pushing water away from the intake pipe so that the larvae are always carried away from the inlet and not sucked into it. i still do a 10 percent weekly water change even though i do not have to, i can feed live or dead foods to larvae and it is not a problem because the bio filter in the sandbed is really good so they break down waste fast.
i can afford to feed the pistol larvae dead food because the larvae size is 3-4mm unlike the much smaller lysmata larvae
 
Hi Aussiemantis great to see another update from you I'm keen to follow your progress. I've just finished building a kreisel for rearing lysmata ambiinensis,so I'm keen to see how that goes. Did you ever try using a kreisel?
 
Hi all,
i have never used a kriesel, i like to use my special tank because i can keep all the broodstock right next to the larvae with dividers in between. I need to cover all grounds, including chemical signals from adults that may cue settlement in cleaners, i've even put corals in the larval tank inside a suction cup breeding box thinking that the corals must release a pheromone that perhaps lets the shrimp know that it is in a location (directly above a reef) where, if it decides to morph into its post larval state, will have plenty of food and fish to clean. i also sometimes experiment by siphoning larvae out and putting them into 10L clear container tubs that you can buy at any supermarket. and going about it in the regular way. i've sort of held back on the breeding of this shrimp as pistols are easier to me and they are fast developers and they fetch a pretty price. however nonetheless it is a personal project and i will do everything i can to make it work out with higher success rates, idc if im 50 and still doing this, it's what i love.

with the container breeding however there is a problem with overcrowding, the majority of the shrimp are in the special breeding tank....the VERY LONG SHALLOW LOL as i call it. it's about 4m long and 1m wide but the glass on the sides is only 20cm high so its a large tank but cannot hold much water. i get good success rates in large plastic containers with hob filter with a sponge and airstone. i still change the water regularly in the containers. i got about 7 shrimp that survived to settlement out of about only 50 larvae in the 10L tub. which is good, but like i said it is not as fruitful as the pistol harvests. hence i do not make much on them. infact i put them in breeder boxes to sell so they are often in my display and i have a dragon wrasse in there and on many occasions he had headbutted the box and the lid has floated off and he has had some very expensive meals in the past using this method lol.
actually....now that i think about it, he has killed a lot of livestock i was planning to sell, but i don't blame him, i blame the **** quality aqua one breeder boxes...WHY DO THEY COME WITH PLASTIC LIDS!!!! they just float off with the slightest movement of the box. seriously! why not make the lid a little heavier...what's the point of having the 0.5mm grates on the lid if it just floats off.....i don't understand.

the container is normally aged for a month before use. for eg. before i got a single pistol shrimp, i purchased a large container, went to the beach, picked up empty oyster shells and sand and got a 60 litre drum filled with real sea water that i used at the time for water changes on the container, the water had an aerator working which kept it fresh. it lasted about 6 weeks which was awesome. there were alot of natural rotifers and other critters in the water but i didn't bother with it. i figured they would starve by the time the first batch of eggs would spawn anyway so it's no threat to the larvae. now your beginning to understand how much i've experimented. i cant even write about it because as i'm typing one thing i've tried another pops up in my head.

put a good aerator in there with an air stone. add your baby brine shrimp enriched on something directly into the tank. experiment with food yourself. i've tried everything from standard brine to brine shrimp enriched on all sorts of stuff. i've even taken a frozen prawn and squeezed it in the water so its juices get released but no pieces actually go into the tank. fishes i've purchased in the past from the lfs grow very very quick when they are fed nothing other than fresh prawns and other crustaceans. when i first got my mantis shrimp he grew very slowly, and was small. when i first had him he was 3 cm long, now he is 9cm long in only 4 months on a diet of fresh prawns and crabs fed daily. he eats a small amount of food every days as opposed to the one meal every 3 days he was getting from his previous owner. this one time during a molt he accidently lost one of his smashers. i was so dissapointed but he grew almost the WHOLE ARM back in only 1 molt. it's something about fresh prawns that just brings out the best in marine life. i guess it's like their version of "maccas' lol, but a healthier version packed with protein and good fats and ALL NATURAL. so they are getting maccas everyday and im jealous :lolspin:

anyways... regarding breeding shrimp.
what you will need
- small filter (optional)
- Air pump and stone (essential)
- small glass tank about 5G-10G (essential)
- plastic fish tank or tub (essential & very handy)
- a good nano display tank which you want do water changes from into your - larval container. change the water in the tub every 3 days using the nano reef water. this also adds up to the water change you will have to do at the end of the week anyway
- heater or cooler - tank is constantly at 25 degrees celsius
in the summer it is awesome because the tank is always at 28 degrees without any need to check it. winter however is a nightmare however i figured that it is a must to continue breeding during these winter months as local supply may be depleted.

regarding feeding the larvae of shrimp
- peppermints settle after a month. cleaners after almost 2. a cleaner shrimp should never be in larval form for more than 2 months. if it is the case there is something wrong and if there is u have to asses the situation....how much were you feeding when they were young compared to now. their food requirements increase greatly at the 1 month mark. they need a lot of stored energy for their final molt, that is why you must only leave the light on for 3 hours max a day. any more and your boat is already sinking before it has sailed. they will only molt once they have enough stored energy AND when receiving a cue. i've had cleaners also settle when they sense fish nearby or perhaps due to the chemical signals released by fish wanting to be cleaned. it will happen when they have enough stored energy to begin the final molt and aims to settle down where there is a healthy supply of fish for it to clean. there are still other factors involved however and i am unable to pinpoint them but i will eventually. i'm on the brink. ill keep you guys posted. tag along
 
Hi all,
i have never used a kriesel, i like to use my special tank because i can keep all the broodstock right next to the larvae with dividers in between. I need to cover all grounds, including chemical signals from adults that may cue settlement in cleaners, i've even put corals in the larval tank inside a suction cup breeding box thinking that the corals must release a pheromone that perhaps lets the shrimp know that it is in a location (directly above a reef) where, if it decides to morph into its post larval state, will have plenty of food and fish to clean. i also sometimes experiment by siphoning larvae out and putting them into 10L clear container tubs that you can buy at any supermarket. and going about it in the regular way. i've sort of held back on the breeding of this shrimp as pistols are easier to me and they are fast developers and they fetch a pretty price. however nonetheless it is a personal project and i will do everything i can to make it work out with higher success rates, idc if im 50 and still doing this, it's what i love.

with the container breeding however there is a problem with overcrowding, the majority of the shrimp are in the special breeding tank....the VERY LONG SHALLOW LOL as i call it. it's about 4m long and 1m wide but the glass on the sides is only 20cm high so its a large tank but cannot hold much water. i get good success rates in large plastic containers with hob filter with a sponge and airstone. i still change the water regularly in the containers. i got about 7 shrimp that survived to settlement out of about only 50 larvae in the 10L tub. which is good, but like i said it is not as fruitful as the pistol harvests. hence i do not make much on them. infact i put them in breeder boxes to sell so they are often in my display and i have a dragon wrasse in there and on many occasions he had headbutted the box and the lid has floated off and he has had some very expensive meals in the past using this method lol.
actually....now that i think about it, he has killed a lot of livestock i was planning to sell, but i don't blame him, i blame the **** quality aqua one breeder boxes...WHY DO THEY COME WITH PLASTIC LIDS!!!! they just float off with the slightest movement of the box. seriously! why not make the lid a little heavier...what's the point of having the 0.5mm grates on the lid if it just floats off.....i don't understand.

the container is normally aged for a month before use. for eg. before i got a single pistol shrimp, i purchased a large container, went to the beach, picked up empty oyster shells and sand and got a 60 litre drum filled with real sea water that i used at the time for water changes on the container, the water had an aerator working which kept it fresh. it lasted about 6 weeks which was awesome. there were alot of natural rotifers and other critters in the water but i didn't bother with it. i figured they would starve by the time the first batch of eggs would spawn anyway so it's no threat to the larvae. now your beginning to understand how much i've experimented. i cant even write about it because as i'm typing one thing i've tried another pops up in my head.

put a good aerator in there with an air stone. add your baby brine shrimp enriched on something directly into the tank. experiment with food yourself. i've tried everything from standard brine to brine shrimp enriched on all sorts of stuff. i've even taken a frozen prawn and squeezed it in the water so its juices get released but no pieces actually go into the tank. fishes i've purchased in the past from the lfs grow very very quick when they are fed nothing other than fresh prawns and other crustaceans. when i first got my mantis shrimp he grew very slowly, and was small. when i first had him he was 3 cm long, now he is 9cm long in only 4 months on a diet of fresh prawns and crabs fed daily. he eats a small amount of food every days as opposed to the one meal every 3 days he was getting from his previous owner. this one time during a molt he accidently lost one of his smashers. i was so dissapointed but he grew almost the WHOLE ARM back in only 1 molt. it's something about fresh prawns that just brings out the best in marine life. i guess it's like their version of "maccas' lol, but a healthier version packed with protein and good fats and ALL NATURAL. so they are getting maccas everyday and im jealous

anyways... regarding breeding shrimp.
what you will need
- small filter (optional)
- Air pump and stone (essential)
- small glass tank about 5G-10G (essential)
- plastic fish tank or tub (essential & very handy)
- a good nano display tank which you want do water changes from into your - larval container. change the water in the tub every 3 days using the nano reef water. this also adds up to the water change you will have to do at the end of the week anyway
- heater or cooler - tank is constantly at 25 degrees celsius
in the summer it is awesome because the tank is always at 28 degrees without any need to check it. winter however is a nightmare however i figured that it is a must to continue breeding during these winter months as local supply may be depleted.

regarding feeding the larvae of shrimp
- peppermints settle after a month. cleaners after almost 2. a cleaner shrimp should never be in larval form for more than 2 months. if it is the case there is something wrong and if there is u have to asses the situation....how much were you feeding when they were young compared to now. their food requirements increase greatly at the 1 month mark. they need a lot of stored energy for their final molt, that is why you must only leave the light on for 3 hours max a day. any more and your boat is already sinking before it has sailed. they will only molt once they have enough stored energy AND when receiving a cue. i've had cleaners also settle when they sense fish nearby or perhaps due to the chemical signals released by fish wanting to be cleaned. it will happen when they have enough stored energy to begin the final molt and aims to settle down where there is a healthy supply of fish for it to clean. there are still other factors involved however and i am unable to pinpoint them but i will eventually. i'm on the brink. ill keep you guys posted. tag along
 
there may be a newly hatched artemia enrichment issue. there is not enough highly unsaturated fatty acids in the brine shrimp for the larvae to grow fast enough on, i've been doing alot of reading and have come across something. apparently, chicken egg yolks are very high in HUFAs and i think i'll try boiling it and then mixing it with some omega 3 and try that. feeding it to the shrimp larvae and some of the oyster blenny larvae i am about to get to culture. ill keep documenting
 
i have read nothing but good reviews about egg yolk, it's jam packed will a lot of vitamins and minerals too. only issue is if the larvae will take it, thats why i am mixing it with cod liver oil to give it that extra punch that the larvae cannot resist.
 
aussiemantis said:
Hi All. Firstly straight off the bat i would like to thank the members on this forum for the many great 'experiments' they have conducted on the popular yet very hard task that is breeding cleaner shrimp. For this Experiment i had used Skunk Cleaner better known as Fire Shrimp. I would have to say that (and i am being truth full) that i have had at least 100 out of a possible 300 larvae that have successfully settled and i Live in Australia so i sell these babies at $120 a pop on our version of craigslist!:uhoh3: yes i know what your thinking...this bloke is probably talking smack ahaha well guess what... whether you believe me or not has no impact on what i'm doing and what i've done, your opinion means nothing to me, i am the captain now (insert meme here...thats right its 2018 and memes are a thing now) I have had success with these guys on a supplyable scale in my 100G shallow and i'm over the moon:bounce3:
basically i'm going to go through a full run down on exactly how i did it so you can perhaps replicate it. All details of the setup will be posted over a weeks period when i have free time. I will tell you exactly what i did and how i did it. I didn't read any special books, i only read what you guys provided me on this site with your own experiences. so i owe this to you guys. also i have not read that silly book called how to train your shrimp or whatever. that is just a sales gimmick designed to suck up your money life alot of other products in this hobby, and if you think i'm lying , exactly how many cleaner shrimps have you been able to rear to adulthood with the help of that book???
I only read what you guys provided plus some old pieces of text about scientific research done in the late 90's on a possible settlement cue or cues for blood cleaners and similar species like the amb and the (more affordable) peppermint. I came across a very interesting piece of text in one of those articles. something that caught my eye regarding settlement cue. something no one thought of before and i was staring at my screen thinking im stupid because i did not pick it out before and it's not even hard to pick out. it's more common sense and i'm being serious. we were missing important details...in fact VERY VERY IMPORTANT DETAILS in the life of larval cleaners and about what causes them to settle in the ocean. they don't just drift the ocean forever, they are only considered plankton while they are drifting in the ocean in their larval state. (i cannot provide any more on this as the answer to this whole thing lies in what i just wrote about the drifting, that is the only clue you get unfortunately) the clue is in there i promise you. in that sentence i provided above. i just pray that you figure it out. you also gotta understand that i cannot give the answer to this as it is an untapped global market. not even scientists (to my suprise :bounce2:)have been able to figure it out...or perhaps they already know the secret and they were just keeping the secret for financial gain however i am actually a young student only 21 and this is now in fact my only cash cow. i have dedicated the last 12 months of my life to this and now it has paid dividends. so of course i will protect the secret. :fun2: ...at all cost lol.

also, dont get me wrong, when i first started i was like everyone else...."why TF are they always dying before settlement" i would always think. it took alot of time and ALOT of money. i spend about AUD$1200 on a custom make breeder tank with all the works. it was a huge 100G shallow. I mean it was LONG. it was about 4m long but only about 20cm high, so it was a looooong very shallow (as i call it) lol. i think giving larvae more space will assist in the survival of larvae and also assist the larvae with settlement. you need a lot of live rock pieces. small a huge piece of christmas LR and place up to 100 pieces in the tank. they shouldn't be touching each other. each shrimp larvae must have a home to go under when it has settled. (i know this sounds like a weird setup but the pics will explain everything) it quite complex however the BIGGEST MISTAKE i made was not building it myself. After seeing the tank finished i had really wished i had made it myself. it would of costed me about $400-$500 if i had and i would of saved close to $800 :headwalls::headwalls::headwalls::headwalls::headwalls::headwalls:
anyways i will post later this week. dont worry. all your questions about nutrition etc will be answered.
Click to expand...



Not that important but it is not clear what shrimp you are exactly talking about. You said "Skunk Cleaner better known as Fire Shrimp". Those names, at least in US, refer to two different species of Lysmata shrimp. Skunk Cleaner shrimp is Lysmata amboinensis whereas fire shrimp is Lysmata debelius.

From what I read previously, L. amboinensis is a lot easier to breed compared to L. debelius (there was one attempt in which it took 80 days for larvae to settle).
 
Hi, sorry about that. I've tried with debilius - fire cleaner & amboinensis - the skunk cleaner.
I thought that survival rates were good however not as good as my pistol shrimp larvae. Maybe its because they morph at lightning pace compared to the debelius. I've had the skunk cleaner settle in under two months in complete darkness on a diet of live newly hatched baby brine enrichred on phyto from a period of 1-8 days, then some 6 hours old brine after that until the 15th day. Now here is when I start changing the diet to some nice sized copepods from my display which there are applenty. Then at the 25th day I start giving crushed crab cuisine and using scissors 3x a week snip off hundreds of tiny pieces of prawns from a single frozen prawn and put that in there. There pieces are only 1-2mm. To cut it this small you have to squeeze it in your finger first and crush the prawn. I also feed them once a week using nutrafin max marine flakes crushed up because it has iodine and its meant to be good for their molting cycle??..
As of late I've sort of held back on rearing these. I already know of some cues which will cause them to settle and those cues combined with prestine water conditions, and a highly nutritious and varied diet will return high survival rates.
I am currently giving it my all trying to breed the brachiasaurus blenny. I had a male with a haram of 3 females. They are regularly swollen with eggs however I didn't take it seriously until I realised that they were a unique aquarium species we don't get much of, and they are a blenny so they should be fairly easy to raise. I was checking out the brood stock the other day and noticed a lonely dead larvae floating around. I had no idea where it came from however that was all I needed to start taking it super seriously and holding off on the lysmata genus for now. Maybe taking a break from the cleaners will give me a fresh perspective when I try them again. I have a breeding journal which I am writing about the blenny so I'll post that whole thing up one I'm done. I saw that one of the females were swollen and I wrote down the date. Now I'll just wait and try to figure this whole thing out. Larvae will be separated into two breeding containers with only airstones. One batch will be fed live baby brine enriched on egg yolk, another will receive first bites until day 8 then be transitioned to crushed marine flake and prawns.
I will record all progress. Follow along If you have a pair.
 
Hi aussiemantis,
That's great info on the feeding regime for the skunk cleaners. The problem here in NZ is getting live food (rotifers, phyto, copepods) there just aren't the suppliers for these products that you have in aussie.

How often were you doing partial water changes on your rearing tanks?
 
i do a 50% change on my small larvae containers (10L) every 2 days and i have about 3 containers running currently. i put all the shrimps into breeding boxes (after putting better suction cups on it) and they are all held up in my display just chilling for the time being while i figure these blennies out. i have to admit i am becoming more and more interested with fish rearing by the day.

I live in australia, there is no Local fish store selling copepods or baby brine for larvae. no one does it. i use ebay.
i am pretty sure that ebay is operating in NZ as well so here is a link to brine shrimp eggs that you can hatch using your tank water with added bi carb soda to increase PH slightly. here is a link
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Brine-S...995665?hash=item41cb4252d1:g:X6UAAOSw0TxZZcpG

i am starting to feed my baby brine on egg yolk. this way the larvae are getting both protein (from the body of the brine) and the good fats from the egg gutload in the brine shrimp they need to store valuable energy for their physical changes.

no larvae as of yet.
 
two of my proper larval tanks have actual hob filters on them with a sponge however there is a airstone pushing water away from the inlet so larvae always drift away.
 
So, jollilolli, have you had better success with a kriesel? Thats what I have read that theyve already tried using, without success. Is that true? I was going to build one but it sounds like aussiemate has found a way to settle them. Its the first time ive heard of someone tank breeding skunk cleaner shrimp.
 
I raise peppermints and have always noted that they are all attracted to light vs photophobic. Can you explain how this works? With the Skunk Cleaner shrimp, do you still need a kriesel? I would like to try to see if i can raise some of the larvae that my pair put out. Can you give me a hand?
 
have any of you guys ever been deep sea fishing before?
you anchor the boat in the deepest darkest reaches of the ocean and hold your position.
secondly, you turn on the high beams pointing straight down into the water and within mere minutes there are thousands of small prey baitfish drawn towards the safety of the light HOWEVER the large fish are attracted too, because they know it means food because the small fish will be drawn towards it.

light is not necessary for shrimp larvae, it doesn't trigger a feeding response because they are not active predators, but more scavengers and bottom feeders so the light is rather more of a safety beacon. if your light is on for 12h a day, the shrimp will spend literally all 12 hours mesmerised by the light or try to escape it, depending on species, this will leave them no time to fan around for brine and they will just become stressed and die. it's something to do with light that leads to poor molting in larval shrimp and it just darn right weakens their exoskeleton being exposed to that much light, TRUST ME! when i was raising cleaners i got a blood shrimp to optimal size in under 50 days before it finally settled. the cue i used was introducing bait fish in a breeder basket and submerging it into the tank. i might try a fish with ick next time. i've only done this one a sizable scale once however, the other times i've tried, it was mainly to investigate possible settlement cues, so i've basically not cared about the health of the shrimp, as long as a few made it to adulthood i could have a good shot at trialling cues. so i feed them big gut loaded brine so they have stored energy and i experiment away :D
the most i have ever gotten to settle at once was 32 Lysmata Debelius out of a possible 100-200. The cue i used to get them to settle has not been shared yet and is the best cue i have so far. but i have sold the shrimp to fund some more research for myself. i have read a lot of free books but i want to buy some expensive bulky ones with actual information from real scientists that were trying to do exactly what i'm trying to do.
With the help of their knowledge and a new perspective on things i will try to crack 50% survival rate by the end of the year.
 
i just read another case of peoples Peppermint shrimp larvae disappearing. they claimed that they came home one day and they only had 10 left...... how this person managed to accomplish this a mystery to me....

this person was using a kriesel with some live rock. had his light on for 12h a day, was feeding non enriched brine...he thought he was doing everything right.

I can pinpoint a few places where he failed in caring for his newborns.

he overexposed light
he did not gut load brine with valuable nutrients and minerals
he did once a week water changes - he had no filter running (this caused a spike in ammonia)
he did not siphon detritus properly daily
I also have a hunch that there were a few critters living in the live rock he had that took out his pep larvae. it could have been anything from a bristle worm to a large copepod or something.
in short, he did everything that i strongly believe you shouldn't do when raising these delicate shrimp larvae.
 
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Isn't that a lot more work?
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reefing102
reefing102
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NancyT3
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