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Hi Guys, thanks for you support. there are alot of secrets and myths about the breeding of this. all will be revealed, i know what i commented before....i said i would keep it a secret, but what is the point in that......im starting to realise that the conservation of marine life is more important than money to me and therefore from now on i will tell you exactly what i did and how i did it. i'm thinking about writing a short book explaining it since it is sort of hard to do so from a post on this site. there are way too many factors involved. for eg.
during my experiments with various batches of debilius, the blood cleaner, i found that i had the highest rates of larval survival with zero light in the tank....this is because i noticed that when i fed newly hatched artemia (fed on reef roids) to the larval shrimp the bbs were attracted to the surface of the water where the light penetrated....and the shrimp larvae however were struggling to get away from the light and were clustered in dark corners, hence they were malnourished. due to this, the shrimp became more and more stressed and eventually starved. IT TOOK ME ABOUT 3 MONTHS ALONE TO FIGURE JUST THIS BIT OUT....THAT IS HOW MUCH TIME I HAVE PUT INTO THIS.
now all my shrimp larvae are cultured in darkness...i guess that this mimics the natural environment that plankton are exposed to anyway, they drift the deep dark depths of the ocean until they are ready to settle. with all my experimenting my larval survival rate is only roughly 15% to 30%, on one occasion post larva state was completed in 48 days.
Since posting this i have dabbled in other crustaceans i am interested in, i am trying my gut out with mantis shrimps, i have a male and female living in the same tank, however i have not observed any signs of mating.
I have had monumental success with Pistol Shrimps of the Alpheus genus which is the only genus known to form a symbiotic pairing with the Oyster Crested Goby, which is a goby which is part of the same genus as the yellow watchman, the Cryptocentrus. i've had pistol shrimp larvae settle in just under 4 days and they grow QUICK and are easy to raise.
I regularly get 50-100 settled shrimp per month.
I haven't had any success nor have i even tried breeding the oyster goby however i do want to give it a crack since i think that there is a pretty penny to be made selling Pairs of the iconic Shrimp Goby pairs. i am already selling a lot of pistols each month, however if i can breed the goby i could make a pretty penny selling Shrimp Goby Pairs.
if you are trying to breed the first thing i would suggest is a tank with an aged sand bed. when i first started breeding i couldn't grasp why people always said to never run a filter and have a bare bottom tank. i'm not a scientist, but to me it seemed a lot of people were complaining that poor water quality was to blame for the death or gradual death of their larvae so it made a lot of sense to me to go with a aged sand bed in an aged tank and a small aqua one 75 Litre per hour hob filter with a filter sponge on the end. i have a very powerful air pump with an airstone right under the intake pipe of the filter. this prevents the larvae from being sucked into the sponge. so there is a strong current pushing water away from the intake pipe so that the larvae are always carried away from the inlet and not sucked into it. i still do a 10 percent weekly water change even though i do not have to, i can feed live or dead foods to larvae and it is not a problem because the bio filter in the sandbed is really good so they break down waste fast.
i can afford to feed the pistol larvae dead food because the larvae size is 3-4mm unlike the much smaller lysmata larvae
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