[AdeDunn]

I thought I'd share some pics of the 2 tanks I have that are actually stocked with various freshwater shrimp, and some pics of the shrimp too naturally.

First up, my 60 gallon palludarium. Water volume is obviously much lower than this, as I never let it go above half way up the tank as that would flood my terrestrial plants. This was a bit experimental, the substrate consisting of pond compost capped with a mix of quartz gravel and flourite. Then there are the 3 red mangroves growing in there that I wasn't sure would even grow..... lol They are actually doing VERY well, as are all of the plants in there. Livestock consists of 20 Neocaridina davidi var Dream blue, 6 Spixi apple snails, some mahogany trumpet snails and some normal ones (no idea how many, they're left over from when this was a normal planted tank).
Next up is my little 30 litre Dennerle cube. This one houses 10 crystal red shrimp, 10 crystal black shrimp and 9 Thai micro crabs.
We have 4 other tanks too, but of them 3 are works in progress and the 4th is an un-stocked "cull" retirement tank for my other freshwater tanks.

You may have twigged at this point, we kinda love shrimp here. I'll share pics of our other tanks once they're further along (our 50 litre Dennerle Scaper's tank for example is nearly ready, just need to switch the water from soft and acid over to harder with a higher pH suitable for Neocaridina.... lol).

[odin]

Hehe we are the same in our house with shrimp everywhere! I also have some Dennerle cubes and i really love them. The blue shrimps you have are gorgeous man! We have some yellow/orange and red Cherries in our freshwater tank but they seem to be breeding and creating some crazy colours. Thanks for the share.

[opae ula related]

Nice! First time heard of Thai micro crabs. Fun to have?

[opae ula related]

Nice! First time heard of Thai micro crabs. Fun to have?

[AdeDunn]

If you view your tank before the lights come on, then yeah. Otherwise you rarely see them as they're rather shy, and been very small can vanish very effectively. lol

This is them when they were all sett to be acclimatised.

[odin]

If you view your tank before the lights come on, then yeah. Otherwise you rarely see them as they're rather shy, and been very small can vanish very effectively. lol

This is them when they were all sett to be acclimatised.

How long do they live for?

[AdeDunn]

The only info I can find about that suggests around 18 months, so about the same as dwarf shrimp.

[odin]

The only info I can find about that suggests around 18 months, so about the same as dwarf shrimp.

That's not too bad, i wonder if you can breed them in captivity

[AdeDunn]

Ahhh, now there's the thing.... Most folks who have tried have failed. For a while it was thought that the crabs released the larvae and they spend time in a pelagic lifestyle (folks even tried mimicking the methods used to rear Amano shrimp larvae, just in case.). Nobody could rear them though, they just kept failing. Then a single keeper managed to rear some, turned out that the ones that were released were basically failures, the person who managed it found that the mother crab actually carried the larvae around with her. She managed to get them as far as been tiny crabs, then once again failure.

My suspicion though is, well these little crabbies are built to be filter feeders and algae browsers. Most folks keeping them are keeping them in spotless planted tanks, or in near sterile breeding tanks... Maybe just maybe what they need is a slightly "mucky" tank, with a bit of algae here and there, and maybe not a spotless substrate.. That's what I'm hoping anyway.

Sadly, looking at their tank right now it seems one of the crabs was already carrying eggs, I say this as right now I can see lots of tiny crab larvae swimming around in the water. On the plus side, I have one crab who sits right out in the open, filter feeding from the water column and graizing on a marimo covered lava rock, and another that comes out at the front regularly... Everything I've read is that folks rarely see their crabs outside of when they feed, so something must be right about my tank for them., maybe.

[AdeDunn]

Some good news in our blue tank (finally! After quite a few things going wrong, including losing quite a few to predatory planaria, and 1 to a nasty parasitic critter). 3 berried shrimp. The 1 I checked and rechecked after the parasite incident, but the eggs are definitely round and are much browner than they look in photographs, where the parasite was bright lime green and looked feathery rather than spherical. It looked odd though as only seems to have about 4 eggs, they're definitely spherical though and move a little when the pleopods move.

berried3.jpg (386.57 KiB) Viewed 14784 times

The other 2 are a nice dark brown colour (the eggs), and their pleopods are packed with eggs.

berried1.jpg (663.63 KiB) Viewed 14784 times

berried2.jpg (700.33 KiB) Viewed 14784 times

Also a pic of one of the younger Topaz shrimp:-

youngster.jpg (311.96 KiB) Viewed 14784 times

Finishing with a pic of a rather unusually coloured shrimp, possibly one of my original blue dreams:-

striking.jpg (504.39 KiB) Viewed 14784 times

To explain, I started out with 20 blue dream neocaridina, as mentioned, but had an invasion of seriously nasty predatory planaria (I watched them actually kill healthy shrimp and eat them) which I treated and wiped out, plus I had 1 shrimp turned out to have that nasty lime green parasite (this one got whacked straight into isolation, and was treated with formalin, but didn't survive) that's showing up in shrimp imported from Asian farms. So once everything settled back down (giving the remaining shrimp to show signs of the parasite if they were going to..) I topped up with 20 blue topaz neocaridina shrimp from a different source. Topaz just been a better grade of blue than dreams, with less opaque black on their bodies, and a nicer shade of blue.

So, anyway, fingers crossed I'll see baby shrimp in there soon.