The New Supershrimp Owner Experience. (Long post!)

[MelWong]

So day 14, Anno Squillarum 1.

Today is the second week I have had these little shrimps, and what a change. First I had a mass molt beginning three to four days ago, and they came out of hiding and started acting fairly hyper as of yesterday night. Today was their second feeding in the time I've had them and the resulting shrimp rugby match is possibly more entertaining than the real thing itself.

Some of them have brightened up quite a lot, but some of the others have remained still fairly pale post-molt, which makes me wonder how long in general it takes for them to turn bright red.

[Mustafa]

Thanks for the update! They will all turn red eventually...your tank is still "young" so it may take a few months. Even so, some will always be much more intense than others. Not sure exactly what's responsible for it, but some are so every intensely red that even disturbing the tank does not cause them to go much paler.

[MelWong]

I've another good sign in my tank. The tiny brown dots characteristic of diatom growth have become visible to the unassisted human eye, which means that if I keep things steady and don't overfeed the green algae should follow, which means the cycle is proceeding as expected.

The shrimp have gotten very active - about six to eight of them grazing up front at a time, usually, although my apartment building is currently undergoing some renovations, and the paint fumes coming in caused a mass hide situation for an afternoon. They came back out once the fumes had dissipated in the evening.

[Bernie]

MelWong: Thank you for your informative posts! Great ideas and beautiful tank!
Yoster: Do you have your tank near the sunlight? Could be causing a burst of green algea? Mastafa would probably be a better person to say for sure, but that was my first thought.
I enjoy reading and seeing pictures of the shrimpies and snails, I find this to be a fun 'hobby' so far (as I mentioned in another post, I'm fairly new, got my tank together in Feb., but have had a couple fish aquariums). I appreciate all that you do, Mastafa, helps us keep our little ones doing well! Thank you everyone!

[MelWong]

MelWong: Thank you for your informative posts! Great ideas and beautiful tank!

I love the tiny Fluval Spec tanks with the caveat that the filter compartment should just be removed for any h.rubra tank, and for other shrimp and fish, well, make sure to put a sponge prefilter over the feed slot (silicone a plastic bracket in there to hold the sponge) and turn the output pump WAY down because at full flow it's too strong for some fish to cope with. The 2 gallon ones are perfect for opae, at least because I'm hoping to breed them, but the 5.6 gallon one would make a very nice picotank with some plants and freshwater shrimp, like red cherries, in it.

I enjoy reading and seeing pictures of the shrimpies and snails, I find this to be a fun 'hobby' so far (as I mentioned in another post, I'm fairly new, got my tank together in Feb., but have had a couple fish aquariums). I appreciate all that you do, Mastafa, helps us keep our little ones doing well! Thank you everyone!

My only camera right now is a six-year-old kind of crappy digital camera, and I haven't the budget to get the nice Canon Rebel I want so badly, so good pix of my shrimps will have to wait. On the other hand, lots of other posters post glorious pictures of their shrimp, especially Jill, who seems to be putting her macro lens to good use.

Hm. I wonder if a Shrimpcam would be a fun webcam setup to put up, but opae'ula are so tiny I'm not sure I'd be able to juggle detail and the general tank view properly.

[BostonJill]

MelWong:
My only camera right now is a six-year-old kind of crappy digital camera, and I haven't the budget to get the nice Canon Rebel I want so badly, so good pix of my shrimps will have to wait. On the other hand, lots of other posters post glorious pictures of their shrimp, especially Jill, who seems to be putting her macro lens to good use.

Hm. I wonder if a Shrimpcam would be a fun webcam setup to put up, but opae'ula are so tiny I'm not sure I'd be able to juggle detail and the general tank view properly.

Thanks for your compliments Mel. I love photography and had just bought my Macro lens when I took those pictures.
I was also thinking how fun a shrimp cam would be too but having an imac the choices of network cameras are limiting for us Apple people. If anyone could suggest a good one that runs on the Apple platform that would be great.

[MelWong]

I was also thinking how fun a shrimp cam would be too but having an imac the choices of network cameras are limiting for us Apple people. If anyone could suggest a good one that runs on the Apple platform that would be great.

I'm also an Apple user, but I'm normally pretty privacy-obsessed, so the only time I actually used my webcam was when I was on exchange in Finland, mostly to Skype family members back in the US, so I don't have any suggestions for that, sadly.

[MelWong]

It's been nearly four weeks since the shrimp arrived in their nicely padded box, and I have good news to report.

A faint greenish tinge has started appearing here and there on the reef rocks I use in the tank, which means now that the diatoms have established themselves, the algae has started growing, too. The shrimps have been even more active than they were in the past week, which means that things are right on track for the tank's bacterial cycle.

EDIT: I have a baby snail! I just caught it crawling very slowly around the pores of the lava rock where the shrimp and adults can't reach. No doubt it can reach algae growing in there that the others can't access.

[Mustafa]

Sounds like your tank is coming along nicely. The biofilm doesn't just serve as food, but they also help "clean" the water by removing ammonia, nitrates, phosphates etc. (from food, shrimp excretions etc.). That's why things settle over time when one does nothing. I hope we'll see "I have a berried shrimp!" in one of your future updates within the next few months!

[MelWong]

It's been over a month, and the tank has settled nicely. No babies, but an interesting discovery or two. Firstly, the shrimp that I had supposed to be yellow colored up to an orangey-red. When it gets startled it reverts back to white, and then colors up to yellow before it gets orange and red again. Which is interesting, but I'm not sure it's any kind of new morph.

However, one of the shrimp which has stubbornly refused to color up at all this whole time has started saddling - I've spotted an immature egg saddle forming in its body, and the eggs are sort of bluish? I'n not sure if it's just because the eggs are immature, so I'm going to keep an eye on that one. Another one of my females is saddling up, and then there's still Sadie, who looks like she's packed full of eggs, but hasn't berried yet.

EDIT: Snow White (the pale shrimp) is indeed saddling up green. What are the odds? A shrimp that has yellow under the red coloration, a white shrimp that saddles up green... what are these, Professor Xavier's tank for gifted young shrimp?

[Mustafa]

Ok, it sounds like you have a *real* white Supershrimp this time around. Maybe you should play the lottery one of these days...

[MelWong]

Day 45, Anno Squillarum 1: My shrimp continue to do very well. They've all reddened up spectacularly except for two individuals, one of which I have named Snow White as it is becoming apparent that she is saddling, and not only that, but bearing green eggs in her saddle, and so I have a good suspicion (confirmed by Mustafa) that she is probably a white Supershrimp morph. Sadie continues to swim around completely loaded up with eggs in her ovary, and another one of the dark red shrimp is beginning to saddle as well. A good sign, I think, for my water quality and the cycling of my tank.

I've had another rash of molts, which suggests that my shrimp have been playing strip poker again.

I have established that two 0.5mm sinking food pellets is exactly the right amount to feed 11 supershrimp - one more and they don't finish it in time.

My tank furnishings - rock, mostly - and the side and back walls of my tank are completely covered in the tiny brown dots of diatoms. The reef rock has gained a greenish tinge from algae colonizing its more porous surface, but I suspect the algae on my tank walls may be masked by the greenish hue of the glass anyway. Bubbles are rising from the reef rock and the chaeto when the tank light is on, which is a good indicator of respiration going on. The chaeto has also grown. The clump in front just grows into a tight ball because it's constantly rotating when I replenish the water - it's a hot summer here in North Carolina and I'm topping up more often than last month - but the clumps in back have sprawled out a bit, and I just used a cocktail skewer to pack them down into their crevices more compactly. My shrimp don't seem to mind how tightly the chaeto is packed - they still wriggle their way into the tangle and graze there, which can lead me to wonder where missing shrimp are when I perform a headcount, until I notice the wriggling in the chaeto.

My snails have seen fit to bestow upon me a tiny baby snail - the only one I've seen as a juvenile so far - and I now have 12 adult-size snails and 1 pinhead snail. It cruises along on the reef rock, feeding in tiny pore-holes where the shrimp nor other snails can reach.

The diatoms were thick enough on the front of my tank that I wound up employing my Mag-float for the first time a week ago. The reaction was pretty spectacular. The scrubber moved around like a zamboni on the inside of the glass and diatoms swirled in the water.

At first the water movement startled the shrimp, and they hid in their little reef rock cave that I'd built for their uh, breeding purposes. Then they realized, swirling around in the water was a wafting of delicious diatoms, free-floating, without requiring the effort of swimming up onto the glass, clinging on with their six walking legs and picking them off manually with their four maxillipeds.

So they basically did what I would have done if bacon had started falling from the sky. After a moment of observation and realization that the algae zamboni was not in fact something that would eat them, they went out of their hidey-cave, and swam around chomping. Like, well, if you watched the Simpsons episode where Homer goes into space? That bit with the ruffled potato chips to Blue Danube Waltz?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnPGDWD_oLE

[Mustafa]

Thanks for the update! The next time your shrimp go after the algae pieces floating in the water, just put on the Blue Danube for the Simpson's effect.

[MelWong]

The shrimp are helping my knitting output incidentally. I keep having to have an excuse to sit beside them and watch so I work on a sock while I'm doing so. (:

[Mustafa]

Looks like the shrimp did an excellent job...along with you.