While at the end of the summer I have a lot of conferences to attend, one of the Amano females decided it was that time of the year to breed. Thanks to the recent house upgrade, I have a little more space so I decided to see how the breeding goes. I isolated the female in a bare bottom container with water from the original tank. The tank only has a hiding place for the Amano female with some moss on it and an airstone. Temperature is about 22°C. For simplicity we will consider the day of transfer as Day 0.
Day 1:
Observed the two larvae / zoeas swimming towards the light. They are about 1.5mm long
Day 4:
Transferred 4 larvae to saltwater with no problems. But managed to some nice macros of them. The last picture is a 1:1 uncropped macro. The ones below are cropped help zoom in on the details. You can see the enlarged uropods, the hairlike structure at the end of the tail. They use them for floating around and swimming with their abdominal segments. In adults they are barely visible.
Image 1 Amano Larvae floating at the top of the water using the uropods
Image 2 Sideview of Amano shrimp larvae at day 4
Image 3A larvae of the Amano shrimp, Caridina multidentata, before being transfered to freshwater 1:1 macro
Image 9 A larvae of the Amano shrimp, Caridina multidentata, before being transfered to freshwater 1:1 macro
Day 11:
Up to now I have transferred 70 larvae to see water. I maintain a slight water movement with an airstone and the larvae seem to enjoy floating about. A trick I discovered to increase the hatching rate is to add a little bit of cooloer RO water.
Image 10 Small amano shrimp larva floating in salt water
- At the moment the water parameters are
- 22°C
- conductivity - 360
- specific gravity - 1.022
- pH -7.8
The plankton culture has arrived but is pretty dilute. I picked up a plankton concentrate designed for artemia . The larvae seem to float more after 1-2 drops are put in the container. They also seem to graze on the biofilm formed.
Day 14:
Image 11 A large group of larvae floating around
All the eggs hatched from the female. Up to now I transferred about 165 larvae to seawater. Now it's time to let them grow.