Amano's

mikedmatthews · Post by **mikedmatthews** » Fri May 25, 2007 8:02 am

woke up to something pretty cool today. i pulled 4 berried females last night an started acclimating them over to brackish. when i went down this morning to feed everyone, i found a ton of zoea released. i'm setting up three tanks this time (not going to put all my zoea in one basket -ha!). good thing there aren't any auctions coming up, because this is totally taking over my prep table!

before i did this, one of the females relesed all of hers in the freshwater tank. i've read some people net them out and put them into brackish after they get release, but from what i can see in my tank i have no idea how they do it! there were so few that were visible that i can't see how it would be successful.

badflash · Post by **badflash** » Fri May 25, 2007 10:56 am

Stop acclimating the females to brackish water. It will kill them!

To get the zoes get a bright point light, like a halogen lamp, put it over the water and totally darken the room. The zoes are attracted to the light. You can suck them out with a turkey baster.

mikedmatthews · Post by **mikedmatthews** » Fri May 25, 2007 12:29 pm

good to know. i thought i was making it better for the babies, but i will stop doing that then. the last time i got zoea i had 2 females in brackish for a month and they looked ok, they are back in fresh and are still ok, so maybe i didn't have it high enough concentration to kill them. i still have the four from yesterday in some now, so i'll start switching them back when i get home from work.

i wish i had seen that before. i read so much here and never noticed that detail. there is a lot of information to assimilate. i would swear though that i had read this method somewhere, i suppose it wasn't here, because i'm not sure it would have occurred to me to do it on my own.

thanks!

Post by **Mustafa** » Fri May 25, 2007 1:54 pm

Actually, these shrimp naturally occur in brackish water, too. It's just that "brackish" is not narrowly defined. It's a very wide range. Up to say, 17 ppt *should* be ok with these guys judging from the salinity tolerance of some of their relatives. I'll have to test this hypothesis though.

Mike, how brackish was your water?

mikedmatthews · Post by **mikedmatthews** » Fri May 25, 2007 2:18 pm

well, i'm using two different plastic hygrometers, so they aren't really that accurate, but i'm shooting for 1.011+/- 0.001 (so 15.9 - 13.3). that's what i keep my brackish bows at, so i figured it should be ok.

a buddy of mine is trying to sell me an electronic one that he has, but until today when i was scrambling to set up tanks before work i didn't see much value in it. the plastic ones really are junk.

Post by **Mustafa** » Sun Jun 10, 2007 6:01 am

The plastic ones are totally sufficient. And your salinity sounds fine. You can always adjust it in either direction if needed.

mikedmatthews · Post by **mikedmatthews** » Sat Aug 04, 2007 8:35 pm

well, this has been an adventure. the first (..er..second i guess is the one i mentioned here) big batch went belly up. couldn't get the tank cycled and feed at the same time. then i started using marine algea to feed and i killed that (more on the way). and today i got a real close look at my females. i've been waiting for a decent group of larvea for a while now and noticed one looked "unfettered". so i net them all - no eggs. guess they ate them all! so out they go to the shrimp tank and i netted 4 more that were berried to stick in the maternity ward. oh...i WILL get this right!

my rainbow shrimp are doing great though. the babies are almost 1/2 inch now. if they weren't so danged fast i might snap a pic. haven't counted them in a month or so, but i had maybe 30-50 as a rough estimate make it to a month.

mikedmatthews · Post by **mikedmatthews** » Fri Aug 10, 2007 9:12 pm

ooo! i think i got one!!! what's a late stage amano baby look like anyway? the one i just spotted is maybe 3/8" long looks to me mostly shrimpy in shape (like maybe the legs need to go through another larval stage maybe) and has a slight reddish cast, which i'm guessing is from grazing diatoms since i haven't been adding extra food to the larvae tank. i've got a big wad of java moss in there too so i think between that and diatoms, and any of the marine algea that got added and survived it must have been surviving on that. wonder if there's any more in there? it sure doesn't like the flashlight hitting it! think i might try to shoot a pic, but that went pretty poorly with my rainbow shrimp. guess i need a fancier camera. until this, the only cool thing that was going on in there was that i had a fairy shrimp just sort of show up. that was weird.

badflash · Post by **badflash** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 1:10 pm

Sounds like the mysid stage. Keep your fingers crossed!

The fresh site has pictures of the larval stages:
http://caridina.japonica.online.fr/English/Galerie.htm

mikedmatthews · Post by **mikedmatthews** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 2:13 pm

that looks right. the pics from the link to the mike's machine page are awesome! my camera wouldn't get anything close to that. the way the body looks close up would explain the movement. almost like it moves in surges, or hops instead of walking. had some folks over today and i couldn't locate it. figures, just when i want to show off something cool, its hiding.