Cherry shrimp high strangeness

[Traumablades]

Hi everyone, 

I have a question that searching hasn't really provided any answers for. Maybe someone here knows. 

I have a 15 gallon Fluval Flex that I set up and recently added 10 cherry shrimp to, I'm not super good at sexing shrimp but all of them appear to be female, the guy at my LFS who helped me out also thought they were all female. None were berried that I could see. None have been berried at all in the mere 2 weeks that I've owned them.

24 hours after bringing them home one individual was dead, and there was a molt in the tank. Next day there were 3 molts. By day 5 there were shrimplets, lucky me! I felt like I won the lottery. 3 days later one more adult died, and 5 days later there are new shrimplets. They are half the size of the original batch, and clear, whereas the older shrimplets have started reddening up. 

What is going on? Where did all these new, tiny babies come from? As I said no one is berried, and I haven't owned them long enough for any individual to sneakily develop a clutch, even if there is a male in disguise in the tank.

Just curious if any of you all have had mystery shrimp babies happen, do Cherry shrimp have partial batches of young? Maybe one molted with nearly hatched eggs and the young survived somehow? Or perhaps the larger shrimplets are from the same clutch and are just fast growers? 

Edited April 22, 2021 by Traumablades

[lefty o]

do you believe in immaculate conception? LOL dont know what to tell you.

[Oakenstein]

All I can say is I wish. I got a batch of 8 from LFS who turned out to be all female. They were too young to sex definitively when I got them, but they were all carrying saddles by month 2. Fingers crossed for@lefty osuggestion!

Otherwise, I wonder if it was an early molt because of the move that shed the eggs, and then they happened to be somewhere with enough aeration that some of them survived. If the eggs were too small to be noticed when you and the LFS inspected the shrimp, though, the timeline doesn't seem right either. 

[Traumablades]

3 minutes ago, Oakenstein said:

All I can say is I wish. I got a batch of 8 from LFS who turned out to be all female. They were too young to sex definitively when I got them, but they were all carrying saddles by month 2. Fingers crossed for@lefty osuggestion!

Otherwise, I wonder if it was an early molt because of the move that shed the eggs, and then they happened to be somewhere with enough aeration that some of them survived. If the eggs were too small to be noticed when you and the LFS inspected the shrimp, though, the timeline doesn't seem right either. 

That's kind of what I was thinking, that one molted her eggs and they've somehow survived, with some only emerging now due to a lower oxygen content where they developed. My tank does have pretty high flow, and is planted, so my O2 levels are probably pretty decent. But if this scenario is true they've gotta be the hardiest babies a shrimp ever had. 

 

I definitely feel lucky for all the babies, RCS are not super cheap where I live, and if I get a colony going from this it's like winning the lottery. It's just so weird because the gestation timelines don't line up at all with what I'm seeing. 

[DSH OUTDOORS]

When you picked up the original shrimp did they put anything in the bag with them?  Like you said, the timelines don't match up especially considering how tiny newborn shrimplets are.  If the store put some media or plant cuttings in with them to aid in transfer they might have been hidden inside or on these items.