Breeding Peppermint Shrimp

Sallstrom

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Seawitch submitted a new Article:

Breeding Peppermint Shrimp

Peppermint shrimp.
wwcpeppermint_shrimp_1800x1800.jpg

Photo is from the World Wide Corals website. ©2019, All Rights Reserved.

Note from the Editor:

The following breeding information was kindly furnished to us by @Sallstrom, who is a professional marine biologist in Gothenburg, Sweden. In my discussions with him, he felt that breeding peppermint shrimp was well within the realm of possibilities for a home aquarist.

In taxonomy, the peppermint shrimp, Lysmata wurdemanni, was split into four species about 10-15 years ago. In the marine aquarium trade, however, we usually just refer to one type of "peppermint shrimp."

For breeding this particular shrimp, there are two major challenges: 1) to keep the larvae suspended in the water column for the first few weeks (without getting washed over an overflow or injured by any equipment, for example) and 2) providing food--and enough of it--that is small enough for the larvae to eat.

The information below is brief. However, it is to the point, and I'm sure that @Sallstrom will be happy to answer any questions in the thread below the article. Not included is detailed information about culturing the microscopic organisms needed to feed the larvae, which we will address in a later article. My own questions or comments are in italics.


Breeding the peppermint shrimp, Lysmata wurdemanni.

We tried breeding peppermint shrimps, Lysmata wurdemanni, for the first time a couple of months ago. I picked up some new ideas from a Dutch breeder I wanted to test, and it worked out well. We now have eight (8) small shrimps from the first batch. One of them is carrying eggs, so we might get more generations. It's a pretty simple setup, so I'm sure many can do it at home.

This is the short version of our peppermint shrimp breeding setup:

First you get two peppermint shrimps. They can change sex back and forth, so no need to get a pair. [Peppermint shrimps are protandric simultaneous hermaphrodites.]

Then feed them and keep them happy and sooner or later you will see one of them carrying eggs. Move the ones with the eggs to a larvae bucket.

Wait 10-12 days, and check every morning to see if the eggs are hatched [and released]. When hatched remove the adult.

How to make a larvae bucket.

Take a 5-liter bucket and drill 20 holes in the bottom. Cover the bottom with a filter mat*, which is about 2 cm thick.

Cover the mat with fine sand.

Drill a hole for a pipe through the side of the bucket, just below where the waterline will be. That will be an airlift, pumping new water into the bucket.

Turn the end of the pipe inside the bucket so it pushes the water around the edge. The water should move around in a circle, that's what is keeping the larvae afloat.

Here's a drawing:

r2rLarvae bucket 1.jpg

Drawing is courtesy of @Sallstrom, ©2019, All Rights Reserved.
So the bucket is standing inside another tank. And in that [outer] tank you can have all the filtration you want, or connect to a sump, etc. That way we managed to keep larvae alive and afloat over two months, until they settled, without the need of water changes inside the inner tank or moving the larvae.

Feeding the larvae.

The larvae are pretty big (for a larvae) and can eat live newly hatched artemia right away. We’ve also tried powdered flakes, and they’ll grab on to that too. It’s good to have live phytoplankton for the artemia to eat; that way the artemia are more nutritious when eaten by the larvae. There are probably lots of ways to get them to eat and grow. Copepods are probably better than artemia, but we didn't have any at the time. [This means you have to also culture A) phytoplankton and B) artemia to feed the larvae.]

Okay, let me ask a couple of questions about the shrimp setup. If water comes out the bottom of the inner tank, and is filtered through the sand, then isn't the artemia and phytoplankton *staying* in the inner tank and getting more and more concentrated (dirty)? Because you're adding new live artemia and phytoplankton every day, right? Then wouldn't you have a lot of dead artemia in the tank too?

The artemia stay in the bucket. The phytoplankton go out through the bottom, I think. In our setup the artemia got eaten, even if we kept on feeding. The artemia not getting eaten should stay alive as long as there are some phyto in the bucket, too. But sure, the bucket might get a bit dirty. We kept the light low so we didn't have any algae problems. We had to stir the sand a couple of times because it got clogged.

*What do you mean by filter mat?

This is what I call a filter mat. Probably called something else in English:).

Screen Shot 2019-04-02 at 8.32.49 PM.png

Screenshot courtesy of @Seawitch.

I found several similar products available in North America for aquarium or pond filtration.

I wanted to include a video of Martin A. Moe giving a presentation at a MACNA conference showing how he solved the problem of keeping Diadema sea urchin larvae afloat.




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Author Profile: @Sallstrom

David is a professional marine biologist at Sjöfartsmuseet Akvariet, or The Maritime Museum & Aquarium, in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has a super-interesting build thread covering his work at the museum, where he is the resident coral nerd. He has been keeping saltwater aquariums either at home or at work since 2001.
 

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So how many have you raised?

This is one of the first things I wanted to raise in my new aquaculture system.
 

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What is the tube connected to that pipe? Is an air pump supposed to be connected to the end of the pipe? What exactly is that "pipe"?
 
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What is the tube connected to that pipe? Is an air pump supposed to be connected to the end of the pipe? What exactly is that "pipe"?
The pipe is from an old small air driven sponge filter I found lying around. Something like this: https://2.air-pump.org/powkoo-aquarium-sponge-filter-fish-tank-air-pump.html
The model I used was one with a nozzle ready for a air hose.

But I doesn't have to be that complicated. You want air bubbles going from the bottom of the pipe, going up inside the pipe and out. This making water flow from the bottom of the pipe up and out through the outlet. In Sweden we call that an air lift, I'm not sure on the correct term. So you can attach an air hose anyway you like, as long as the bubbles are released somewhere inside the pipe, forcing them the bubbles to go the "right way" out(through the outlet).
 

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The pipe is from an old small air driven sponge filter I found lying around. Something like this: https://2.air-pump.org/powkoo-aquarium-sponge-filter-fish-tank-air-pump.html
The model I used was one with a nozzle ready for a air hose.

But I doesn't have to be that complicated. You want air bubbles going from the bottom of the pipe, going up inside the pipe and out. This making water flow from the bottom of the pipe up and out through the outlet. In Sweden we call that an air lift, I'm not sure on the correct term. So you can attach an air hose anyway you like, as long as the bubbles are released somewhere inside the pipe, forcing them the bubbles to go the "right way" out(through the outlet).
Cool, thanks. I'll try this out at some point probably once we're out of coronavirus hell.
 

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This is brilliant! Looks exponentially easier to build than a conventional Kreisel tank...thanks for sharing! PS...how would you clean the sand in this setup to remove the larvae's solid waste, dead live food critters, etc? Do you simply refrain from cleaning the sand until the larval organisms have metamorphosed into settled juveniles? Could I use a pair of turkey basters to clean the sand?
 
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This is brilliant! Looks exponentially easier to build than a conventional Kreisel tank...thanks for sharing! PS...how would you clean the sand in this setup to remove the larvae's solid waste, dead live food critters, etc? Do you simply refrain from cleaning the sand until the larval organisms have metamorphosed into settled juveniles? Could I use a pair of turkey basters to clean the sand?
We just stirred the sand very gently with a small stick when we saw that the water line/the surface level increased (when the flow through the sand decreased). Stirred just enough to get the level down again. Otherwise we didn’t clean the sand.
 
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This is brilliant! Looks exponentially easier to build than a conventional Kreisel tank...thanks for sharing! PS...how would you clean the sand in this setup to remove the larvae's solid waste, dead live food critters, etc? Do you simply refrain from cleaning the sand until the larval organisms have metamorphosed into settled juveniles? Could I use a pair of turkey basters to clean the sand?
And thanks! I stole the idea from a German breeder :)
 

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We just stirred the sand very gently with a small stick when we saw that the water line/the surface level increased (when the flow through the sand decreased). Stirred just enough to get the level down again. Otherwise we didn’t clean the sand.
OK! That's what I needed to know. One more question...how do you do water changes on this setup? Do you do small daily water changes to prevent a large change in the water level that could harm the larvae?
 
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OK! That's what I needed to know. One more question...how do you do water changes on this setup? Do you do small daily water changes to prevent a large change in the water level that could harm the larvae?
Sorry for the late replay.

We had two of these buckets in one tank, about 200 litres. That tank was a part of a system with six tanks and two sumps, about 1200 litres in total. We usually run our systems after the Triton philisophy, only change water if needed. So there were not a lot of water changes. The system had algae refugium and some corals that took up nutrients, so we could feed as much as we wanted in the larvae buckets without any large effect on the water quality.
When we did water changes, we changed water in another 200 litre tank so the new water got mixed first in there, then in the sumps, before it got to the larvae setup.

An important part of using these buckets IMO is that you have larger water volume than if you just had a regular bucket. Just to aviod big changes in water quality, temp, pH, salinity, etc. On the other hand you risk getting pests like Aiptasia in the breeding tanks. So it's not perfect all the time. But you don't have to worry about overfeeding.

I like to connect breeding tanks to larger systems, and we've used coral systems for breeding both seahorses and cuttlefish for example.
 

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I'm getting another peppermint and will watch. Never noticed eggs when I had a pair.
 
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Some more mixed info:
Here's a great thread on trying to breed Harlequin shrimp, with lots of thoughts and ideas on setups!

 

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Call this a late question, but...how large does the tank holding this 'larval bucket' need to be? About the largest I can achieve at this time is a 5 gallon...my landlord has limited me to 30 gallons of aquarium, and I cannot have a larger fry rearing setup than that without sacrificing the Parvocalanus cultures for feeding the fry until they are large enough for brine shrimp nauplii. (If this helps, I was going to try to only rear 12-24 larvae of any species I try to breed)
 
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Call this a late question, but...how large does the tank holding this 'larval bucket' need to be? About the largest I can achieve at this time is a 5 gallon...my landlord has limited me to 30 gallons of aquarium, and I cannot have a larger fry rearing setup than that without sacrificing the Parvocalanus cultures for feeding the fry until they are large enough for brine shrimp nauplii. (If this helps, I was going to try to only rear 12-24 larvae of any species I try to breed)
I’ve only tried this with 5L (1,25 gallon) buckets. But I’m sure it can be done with smaller buckets too. And the holding tank just needs to be big enough for the bucket to fit. What you are after is the flow (“round flow”) and the sand bottom that serves as a filter (for the food and fry not to leave the bucket).
When it comes to the total volume(or the volume of the holding tank), bigger is more stable and can handle more feeding. But that’s me who don’t want to change water every day. With a smaller water volume perhaps you need to change a bit of water now and then. And it could work fine! Just give it a try! :)
 

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Here's a real off-tangent question...could a setup like this be used for jellyfish?
 
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Sallstrom

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Here's a real off-tangent question...could a setup like this be used for jellyfish?
I want to say no(except for Cassiopea jellyfish), but since I haven’t tried I can’t say for sure. A jellyfish master would probably figure out a way to do it with just some minor changes :)
In most cases you don’t want any substrate on the bottom with jellyfish.
 
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