Shrimp from the aether!

[CT_]

I got my first shrimp colony (neos) about a year ago.  first few sets of babies threw a TON of off color but dark culs.  some full reds, some almost black, and some that after enough time turned into a spotted rusty red.  I put about 30 in my QT/ricefish mating tank and more or less forgot about them.  I didn't do enough water changes and when i did they were large.  30 dwindled to about 2-3 and I assumed the rice fish ate them because I never actually saw bodies.  The two or three grandma shrimp left are now huge and all female. 

 

A few days ago I cleaned all the algae and crud off of one of the sides of this tank and went on my way.  Last night I peeked in and saw a bunch of 1cm long juvenile shrimp!  they must have been in there for a couple months at least to have grown that big and the glass was so dirty I never noticed them before.  Its just crazy to me that after all that poor treatment a few managed to hold on, including a male I never saw once, and are now repopulating that tank! 

 

I'm getting some more dark blues out of it too so I'm going to un-cull some and cross them back into my newer but lower grade colony (colony 1.0 has mostly died due to my cardinals deciding that shrimp taste good).

 

Anyway I thought I'd share since its a fun surprise. 😉

[Beardedbillygoat1975]

Neglect and Neocaridina has been a theme on this forum and I’d agree the more fretting you do over the colony the worse the outcome. You sort of stumble on these kind of setups and suddenly you have 100s of shrimp.

They need a lot of food and that can come in so many forms - biofilm, algae, fish food, shrimp food, veggies etc etc. A few years back the literature online was don’t feed too much but in my find with good filtration and an established mature tank that’s not an issue. I find fish breeding setups work well for Neo colonies as the excess feeding provides food directly as well as indirectly- see some of Mark’s Shrimp Tanks videos about using fish food/flake to feed and spur production of biofilm for his shrimp tanks. 

[ndfi78]

So, what I'm hearing is if I want to raise shrimp, I need to ignore them. 😄

Edited April 18, 2022 by ndfi78