Hubby bought him for me today and i'm so impressed, i'm watching him sitting on the piece of wood he has claimed as his own more than watching England v Sweden.
He's in my 20g with plenty of current.
After acclimatizing him he kept picking up the gravel with his fans and I was worried he might get sick but after leaving him alone with the lights off for a while he had all his fans out.
Here's Bob with an adult apple snail
He has a tiny piece missing from his tail......it's very small but will it affect his health in anyway?
I'm watching him again and his fans are all spread out.....it's such a wonderful thing to watch.
A tiny piece of missing appendages will usually be regenerated at the next molt.
I have two of these and for a treat I sometimes toss in a pinch of freeze dried brine shrimp dust from the bottom of a can of brine shrimp cubes. They LOVE it and really show off their filter feeding behavior.
Just a tiny bit is enough to make them go nuts but not pollute the water.
From the looks of the size of his first set of peripods, you are right to name him Bob because he looks like a male.
When I put him in the tank he wandered around briefly, crawled over a moss ball and then found his perch. It hardly took him any time at all to find the best place for flow in the tank.
He's been in his filtering stance since my previous post. Do they filter all the time? I hope he doesn't exhaust himself.
I read about feeding them in the shrimp varieties section and did a search for bamboo shrimp too but i'm still a bit stumped about feeding. I normally feed this tank every 2 or 3 days and he will get little bits from that I assume. I don't want to make him sweep the substrate for food though.
I put a pinch of ground up algae flake food in the water stream once a day. If they get hungry, they come down off the perch when its dark and clean the gravel. Be sure to escape proof the tank and provide a good cave for him to hide in when he molts. Otherwise he will escape, no matter what you do and "become one with the dust bunnies".
I treat Bob the same way I treat my tiger, cherry, amano and crystal red shrimp regarding other tank mates. I only keep snails & bristle nosed plecs with my shrimp....oh and a few pygmy corydoras in my tank of female cherries which i'm not breeding at the moment. If I decided to breed those cherries the pygmy corys would go into hubby's community tank so they wouldn't nibble any shrimplets.
Thanks for your concern though...Bob appreciates it.
Bob moulted for the first time in my tank and I was very surprised that it was brown and not see-through. I've seen amano, cherry and tiger moults which were all clear apart from the top and tail of the tiger moult which was slightly orange. I never knew bamboo shrimps moults were brown....it reminded me of a suit of armour or a weird deep sea monster lol.
Here's a pic of his moult next to a ruler....it's a bit twisted but I didn't want to touch it.
They are just bigger, and thus thicker, which is why they aren't clear like little shrimp. My M. Rosenbergii are not clear either. First time I saw one I though my shrimp died.
I usually leave dwarf shrimp moults in the tank but since this moult was so big in comparison I didn't want it to affect the water parameters.....plus I used it to play a joke on my hubby *evil giggle*....I pretended Bob was dead and hubs believed me for about 2 seconds until he said "Hang onnnnn, you freak out when something dies". LOL
I also scared my 17 year old son with it......cheers Bob!
