Ooooooooops..........Bought Pregnant Shrimp!

[ClassicRocker]

Have a 5 gallon w/a male betta, a male ghost shrimp and 4 live plants. Wanted to get two more.

Went to LFS and asked for two large Ghost Shrimp, not knowing that the large ones were females! Wound up with two and one (if not both) pregnant! When I looked at the shrimp closer, it did seem like the one had eggs in it. I asked the Petsmart fish/aquarium clerk if they were females and pregnant and her response was "heck, I don't know". We bought them anyway. After putting them into tank, I could definitely see that they were bigger than the one we had in there. Within one day, we had a baby ghost shrimp swimming around! Lucky for us, our male betta pays virtually no attention to any of these shrimp.

So, the one female shrimp was taking up a lot of the space where our betta likes to swim and my wife didn't like that. He would just swim around it, she wanted it taken out. So, wound up taking both of the females out. Now have one male and a baby in the tank AND, now that we know the difference between male and female, will buy another male.

Since this tank is only a 5 gallon, and we feed the very small Hikari Betta Bio-Gold pellets along with a "now and then" small piece of frozen Bloodworm or brine shrimp, there is very little food waste for these shrimp to eat. Because of this, I drop a flake of fish food in every few days for food.

One thing FOR SURE............we didn't want a tank full of ghost shrimp and, since our betta ignores them, we'd end up with quite a few ghost shrimp. My wife distinctively told me "no way"!!

Have you ever bought a pregnant fish, be it a Ghost Shrimp or something else and didn't want that?

 

[Luananeko]

I had this issue with Mystery snails... Bought two for my 29 gallon without realizing they would breed, soon had a tank COVERED in baby snails and ugly slime trails all over the walls. It took forever to finally get them under control!

 

[wildroseofky]

I seriously doubt the little swimming thing is a ghost shrimp. Ghost shrimp eggs hatch into larvae. Very tiny, microscopic larvae. Like tiny mosquito larvae. It takes 4-7 days for them to morph into tiny shrimp. If it is a tiny shrimp than one or more of your males is not a male and has hatched eggs. Ghost shrimp larvae are easily sucked up by filters and eaten by fish. They stay in the top of the water at the surface. They eat the bio film and teeny tiny things that make up a well aged tank. Hakari first bites seems to increase their survival rate.

If it turns out to be a tiny ghost shrimp than it is a sign your tank is very healthy and your Betta is very chill. LOL Not many survive in a tank with fish. I had my entire long thriving colony done in by hungry baby mollies.

 

[Khuligirl93]

I seriously doubt the little swimming thing is a ghost shrimp. Ghost shrimp eggs hatch into larvae. Very tiny, microscopic larvae. Like tiny mosquito larvae. It takes 4-7 days for them to morph into tiny shrimp. If it is a tiny shrimp than one or more of your males is not a male and has hatched eggs. Ghost shrimp larvae are easily sucked up by filters and eaten by fish. They stay in the top of the water at the surface. They eat the bio film and teeny tiny things that make up a well aged tank. Hakari first bites seems to increase their survival rate.



If it turns out to be a tiny ghost shrimp than it is a sign your tank is very healthy and your Betta is very chill. LOL Not many survive in a tank with fish. I had my entire long thriving colony done in by hungry baby mollies.

Not all shrimp species labeled "ghost shrimp" are the same. Some pet stores may just label any clear shrimp as "ghost shrimp". Some species have a larval stage and are very unlikely to survive to be shrimplets unless in a brackish environment with special feedings of infusoria, and some species may reproduce just like cherries.