Mystery snail eggs & inverts journal

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Lil fellow is still in his spot. No odor or anything. I refreshed the tank water on the paper towel. Possible he is in some kind of hibernation: behavior which I have seen from him about 2 weeks ago as well.

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Born to be wild!

 

I haven’t seen any shrimplets lately. I wonder if it is because I have been feeding less. I haven’t been feeding much powdered food at all. I guess I should go back to that. I was figuring when they pick apart the shrimp sticks that would make enough dust to feed shrimplets but maybe not. Also found that the filter wasn’t working well, barely at all. It was the situation where the end of the airline gets loose over time and doesn’t properly seal onto the sponge filter. I snipped the end and reattached and it’s working much better now.

Oh also found some small black worms in the tank(?) during this weekend’s water change.

Multiple females are berried.

One other thing. I keep the light off quite a bit to control the hair algae issue. I wonder if lighting plays any sort of a part in reproduction.

Tonight I fed them “snail cookie crumbs” and they are frenzying over those.

 

 

Edited April 10 by Chick-In-Of-TheSea

[nabokovfan87]

On 4/9/2024 at 4:24 PM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

Oh also found some small black worms in the tank(?) during this weekend’s water change.

Hm.... Never heard of anything like this. Might be indicating some predation?

On 4/9/2024 at 4:24 PM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

Multiple females are berried.

I had the same thing happen and I couldn't figure out what I was doing. It's really awkward because you see them being saddled and then you see them have everything they need, but you don't see the baby shrimp or eggs. It lasted about 3ish months. I would recommend just verify everything is ok and hold course.  Don't worry about powdered food unless you have baby shrimp. Let the plants develop, clean filtration and all that while it's a bit easier to do so. After that little pause in breeding was when my tank exploded and it's been busting at the seams ever since.

I will have to go back through my notes and see if there was something I did in particular to try to perk them back into dropping eggs, but from memory I think it was just a matter of waiting them out and checking for losses.

On 4/9/2024 at 4:24 PM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

Such deep color. Beautiful and seemingly really strong quality.

That line and your shadow blue, black rili is really special!

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

The sky looked like a painting yesterday morning.

Also I made a tasty cornbread today with some bean & bacon soup. I have been experimenting with our new Instant Pot. That thing cuts cooking time in half or even more. Hard boiled eggs 5 min. Baked potatoes 12 min. It did a good job with chicken thighs, as well as the soup I made today. My husband likes to use it for beef stew. Convenient.

Edited April 19 by Chick-In-Of-TheSea

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

On 4/10/2024 at 5:11 AM, nabokovfan87 said:

you see them being saddled and then you see them have everything they need, but you don't see the baby shrimp or eggs. It lasted about 3ish months. I would recommend just verify everything is ok and hold course

Finally! I saw 2 or 3 shrimplets today while the adults were tearing up calcium chips and making a bunch of dust. The little ones were nearby trying to eat some of it, I think. This is a good sign!

Edited April 26 by Chick-In-Of-TheSea

[nabokovfan87]

On 4/25/2024 at 6:50 PM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

Finally! I saw 2 or 3 shrimplets today while the adults were tearing up calcium chips and making a bunch of dust. The little ones were nearby trying to eat some of it, I think. This is a good sign!

That's great! My tank has been feisty with me just due to the weather and the new visitors.  I am totally looking forward to removing the substrate and hoping a thinner layer is the right call here.  Added a heater to the QT tank because it was snowing, now it's boiling hot outside, then I pull heaters and we're back to the low 60's and colder at night.  Oh well!  Heaters are out now and the tanks are doing ok with the up and downs. 

Drop a leaf in and see what you see over the next few days! 🙂 

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Shrimps! (and just a few snails)

 

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Look at this cutie having some cucumber!

 

[nabokovfan87]

Those black neocaridina are doing amazingly.  I wonder if you could get a line of the black rili (also called carbon rili) shadow blues that you have and have a nice easy income off that. I have to imagine they are unique and yours are ridiculously nice.

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Opened my box today, and this fell out when I lifted the flap. It made me smile.

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Shrimps vs soybean pellet

 

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Gorgeous trumpet snail checking the temp

 

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

 

I watched her release babies last night.

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

I spent some time enjoying the shrimp tank tonight. It looked like there were barely any shrimps in the tank…

…until dinner was served.

I found peachy ones

 

and shrimplets

as well as works of leaf art. I just love these. It is so cool.

I’ve been allowing the bladder snails and Malaysian trumpet snails to do whatever. I don’t see very many bladder snails. Maybe 5-10. Some have a creamy s-shaped stripe like the parent snail had . Very pretty. Others are copper colored. They are SO FAST!!

There are more trumpet snails, and I believe I am seeing quite a few now because the lights were off for a few hours and they emerged.  I clicked the light on to watch shrimps for awhile before bed. The light must be kept at a short duration or the hair algae really ramps up.

The mannerisms of Malaysian trumpet snails still fascinates me. Many of these were moved over from Geppetto’s tank when I had to medicate him. I dug in the sand and rescued every single MTS that I could find. 

Look how nice they are keeping the sand. Before it had a bunch of unsightly “catappa leaf dust” (tiny bits of leaf that the shrimps tore up). As we know, siphoning is dangerous to shrimps; especially shrimplets, and I don’t have to worry about it so much now that I have a nice ecosystem that includes these guys.

 

Also in the 29g, Juniper and Button were hanging out on the heater. I handed Juniper a piece of green bean, and he held onto it and enjoyed the snack.

 

Edited Monday at 02:20 AM by Chick-In-Of-TheSea

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

While everyone else is “feeling blue” then we have this guy..