I’ve been working very hard to get these great little shrimp to spawn, and so far I’ve had a minor success. I was able to get 3 shrimp to produce young, but unfortunately they didn’t live for more than a week. I think the problem was a lack of food, or some sort of trace minerals they may have needed (for building a shell?).
After they were released from the underside of the parents who the eggs incubated for about a week (as far as I could tell) they were too small to eat anything except maybe infusoria. The baby algae eating shrimp were very much like glass shrimp, barely visible and only recognizable as a shrimp because you know to look for them? they look like little bits of debris floating in the water, which will travel up or down on occasion (hardly ever swimming horizontally).
I think that each parent shrimp released between 20 and 40 young. Every day (until they died) they looked a little bit more solid; progressing from a bit of debris, to a bit of debris with a tiny strand of slime (the tail), to three bits of debris barely visibly connected (the lowest part was larger than the other two, and presumably the head). After one week they were only about 1.5mm.
I raised them in a 20 long tank, with no filtration, and several pieces of bog log with java moss. I did attempt to feed them on Sera brand Micron (a fine powdered fry food) and small doses of green water.
I have a theory about why they have been so hard for me to spawn. My first batch, was 150 large ones which I purchased and slowly sold over the course of 4 months? in all that time none of them ever showed signs of carrying young, not even the 12 I moved to my home tank for serious power feeding and water changing.
Another time I purchased a batch which were smaller, thinking that
maybe the larger batch I got was possibly over the hill
so to
speak, but the smaller batch eventually grew larger and never had any
young either.
At this point I was beginning to wonder if the batches I was getting could possibly be all females, or all males. This seemed ridiculous at first, but I think it ended up being the case. Whenever I picked a batch out, I would try to look for size differences, thinking that there might be a difference in the size of the males and females, but all the batches I got seemed to be of a very uniform size and no matter what their starting size, all of them seemed to grow to be the same, large adult size.
It was finally in a batch of mixed small and large ones, that I found eggs attached to the underside of the smallest ones (about 1/2 inch).
After talking to a few people, the best explanation I’ve been able to come up with, is that they may be born as females, and then change into males as they become more mature. This is not unheard of in saltwater fishes, and it may also be something that other crustaceans do.
If anyone else is attempting to breed these elusive creature, I would offer the advice that you will want to try and get the shrimps from a few different sources, and you will want to try and get the smaller ones, as opposed to the larger one.
Good luck!