Petshrimp.com Discussion Forum

If hair algae is taking over the tank then it's likely a symptom of another issue (i.e. excess nutrients), and one new shrimp probably won't solve that. Better to remove the hair algae manually and cease feeding until other algae can increase enough to outcompete it.

It is a bit odd how uniformly pale they are, my tank has a few hundred shrimp in it and they've always ranged from pinkish to fairly deep red with only a few pale individuals (excepting times of stress like me moving around things in the tank, causing them all to turn pale for a few hours) and that'...

Really? So how do they survive for weeks until they morph into shrimp? Do they feed off of a yolk sac all that time? I believe so, the yolk is probably some pretty concentrated nutrients, and these shrimp don't eat much to begin with so they can live on it just fine. Actually, even quite a few baby...

It looks to me like you have quite a bit of algae growth so you shouldn't need to feed, let alone every two weeks.

I started another thread on this, so sorry for the redundancy but not having a sponge filter running is also a hard thing for me to do. Why is it better? Because these shrimp like calm water and have no need for a sponge filter. Having one won't necessarily harm them, but simplicity is one of the m...

A proviso, but in a supershrimp tank MTS won't take over either, provided you don't overfeed the tank. Nerites are certainly prettier, but in supershrimp tanks they can sometimes have trouble finding enough food (some people cycle a few between different tanks to allow algae to recover), plus they h...

The issue I hear with keeping this species is that nobody has figured out how to breed them successfully in captivity, and thus all of them are captured from wild populations in habitats that are quite threatened. Has this changed?

It is a shame though, the claws on Metabetaeous are so cool looking.

The water change probably fixed things if there were contaminants. Hanging out near the surface in and of itself shouldn't be a problem, I think usually it just means the shrimp are feeding on surface film (i.e. organics that land or grow on the water surface).

Can't say I've ever seen that kind of change in feeler length happen, usually the feelers should be the same size as before or longer (if the crustacean is growing). It's possible that the feelers were damaged during the molt (i.e. got stuck in the old shell and torn off). That can happen sometimes,...

It's important to remember that the oxygen needs of the opae ula are very low, I recall people even keeping them in 50 gallon tanks without needing anything more than the oxygen that gets in the water from simple exposure to the air. Algae of course helps too.

It's going to be fascinating to see what becomes of this project once the shrimp become available for sale. I really hope for the sake of wild shrimp that it will inspire more professional breeders to get involved in producing them. "Designer opae ula" may well be a thing in the foreseeabl...

Yesterday I saw 7 floaters and I'm wondering now now long is it before they morph? The first ones showed up 12 days ago. I did notice a couple of them going to the bottom and moving through the gravel before floating back up. Does that indicate they're getting ready? Possibly, since they do lose th...

As Mustafa has noted in other threads, its probably not really dying but just declining and it will start growing again at some point. Still, if it is in a period of decline it could fall apart and make a mess, so removing those parts shouldn't hurt anything.

Also if algae is growing to the point that you have to scrape off the tank sides then you can probably forgo feeding at all.

They may simply be hiding. After the initial transition to baby shrimp they can be very hard to find, but after a molt or two they start to be as outgoing as the adults. I know with my initial batches of larvae I thought I had like 50% die offs when they metamorphosed, but later observations showed ...