Ghost shrimp: details and snails

[jrrutecki]

[img]I started with 30 CRS (which went up to 120+, dropped to 6 juvenile shrimp total, due to things I was learning, and is now back at a carefully watched and slow-growing 24 shrimp. (will have to think about getting others to supplement the gene pool as they grow up.) I'll have to post all the sordid details about the CRS, but along the way, I had some interesting things occur with ghost shrimp.

I was getting LFS feeder ghost shrimp for my angelfish...(I've had one sucessful breeding from angelfish which I raised to adulthood; angelfish can be work!) With what I was learning from the CRS, I decided to let some of the feeder ghost shrimp breed so I would have a constant supply. Set up another tank with foam filter (used an established foam), and tossed in a few females carrying eggs. When the females dropped, I'd remove them to another tank, (after seeing a few isolated instances of cannibalism of floating babies.) Java moss, some hornwort, and a well-established substrate later I had more ghost shrimp than you could shake a cichlid stick at.

Ghost shrimp soon ended up in all my tanks, including a brackish water tank with bumblebee gobies and young flounder. They didn't do badly in there, and continued to breed as long as I'd remove the females to the afore-mentioned tank to drop, then move them back. Seemed to suffer no ill effects going from brackish to freshwater so suddenly, either. [That's nothing I'd try with my cherries, though!] My brackish water tank has a sand bottom for the flounder, and a snail problem (like my other tanks.) I usually take care of too many snails in my tanks by smooshing them on the glass, and letting cordydoras cats or ghost shrimp fight over the smooshed snails. Ghost shrimp will 'smell' them from across a tank, converge, and fight over them to see who gets to suck out the algae-guts. Try it, they LOVE smooshed snails.

Not too long ago, I noticed whole, empty snail shells littering my sand tank bottom. (now freshwater again, as the gobies and flounder eventually died and I needed another guppy grow out tank.) I thought I was getting a snail disease. It was mostly the smaller of the little brown ramshorn snails, and the little pond snails, not the adult ones, and soon there were only 3 adult snails in that tank. Soon, I had no small snails in that tank, and was adding snails in from the other tanks, to fend off a growing algae problem. But it was looking like I couldn't keep a snail alive in this tank.

One day, I put about a half dozen small snails in the sand-bottom tank again, and had time to watch my tanks. I saw a large female ghost shrimp descend on a snail, and I watched her turning it over and relentlessly picking at its trapdoor with her feet and mandibles until she could get to the soft bits, by which time it was a goner and she was soon sucking it up. I nearly had a cowfish! This act was repeated by some of the other adult shrimp, with smaller shrimp crowding around and hoping for leftovers.

I have since seen this occurring in my other tanks. I have made sure I keep a handful of ghost shrimps in each tank to munch on snails. They can't eat the older ones, but at this point they are helping to keep the smaller snails under control.

[Mustafa]

Hi Joyce,

Thanks for you detailed report. Yes, ghost shrimp and other Palaemonid shrimp will eat any snail that cannot close their shells shut. My Red Claw shrimp (Macrobrachium assamense/dayanum) are especially good at that.

I absolutely *love* the American Freshwater Glass/Ghost shrimp. They are some of the most interesting shrimp species around. Unfortunately, they are not appreciated much.

In general palaemonid shrimp (i.e. Palaemonetes, Macrobrachium etc.) have a lot more "personality" than Atyid (i.e. Caridina, Neocaridina, Atya etc.) shrimp. They are like the cichlids of the shrimp world displaying territorial behavior and even interesting mating behavior (especially in Macrobrachium). My prognosis is that these shrimp will be a lot more popular in the future...

By the way...did you feed the ghost shrimp larvae in their tank or did you let them just subsist on whatever microorganisms (such as cyclops, copepods etc) were floating around in the java moss? If you fed them, what did you feed them? I feed mine, but sometimes if there are enough microorganisms I don't and they still make it to postlarvae hunting on their own.

Take care,
Mustafa

Take care,
Mustafa

[jrrutecki]

Sorry for the VERY delayed reply. I am doing very well with freshwater glass/ghost shrimp by now. I plop the egg-carrying females into the larvae tank until they drop eggs, then remove them into their regular tank once they've dropped and leave the larvae and babies in peace. I have a powder algae based food for growing brine shrimp that I had started using for the freshwater shrimp larvae. The neat (and sometimes not so neat) thing about it is that its certainly not sterilized and all kinds of copepods and daphnia hatch from it, so there are tons of microorganisms now breeding themselves. I don't even bother feeding them anymore. When I notice bigger 1/2" shrimp I scoop them out.

The not so neat thing about the algae powder food is that once it hatched a dragonfly larva that was prowling around in the tank till I found it. http://www.foagm.org/Album_02-07/dragonfly%20larva.jpg

I'm SLOWLY regaining population ground with my red cherries. The BIGGEST thing that has contributed to the turn around in my success with them is using reverse osmosis filtered water from the local supermarket when I need to change water or top off. It's .25 a gallon, but worth it as I'm not losing any more shrimp at molt or after water changes. Its been easy to keep PH and hardness exactly where they should be and has become almost effortless. Once a week I'll throw a little flake food or tiny piece of a dried seaweed sheet or some zuchini, and things are going along 'swimmingly'.

[chlorophyll]

Where'd you get that food from? I'd love to have a look at what it ends up hatching.