chad vossen
Active Member
I've kept a spawning pair of Hawaiian Harlequin shrimp in my office tank for a couple years now with the intention of rearing the babies. We have focused mostly on fish, so never really gave them a try. We feed one chocolate chip starfish every week to our pair to keep them well fed.
The Hawaiian Harlequin shrimp differs from other Harlequin shrimp by the purple spots and yellow background. In my opinion, the Hawaiian shrimp are the most beautiful of this species. They are also harder to find, and are considered quite rare in the hobby. Our goal is to change that and make them easily accessible to anyone that wants them.
I've yet to catch the shrimp molting, however I did get lucky once and observe the actual spawning process. The male mates with the female multiple times after she has molted. We've captured this on video, which may be the first time it's been documented.
When the eggs are ready to hatch, they begin to hydrate with water and increase in size. This makes the female look much larger than normal. This is when it's time to move the female into our larvae extraction device, which is connected to the Vossen's Larval Trap.
This collection method was highly successful and we collected far more than expected. I estimate 1500 larval shrimp in this hatch, but it's anyone's guess. We transferred the entire batch to a larval tub with ease.
Our first larval run lasted for 6 days, and did very well till day 6. In the morning, they were all alive and doing well. I did a large harvest of copepods and baby brine shrimp to get them through the day, however when I came home from work 9 hours later, they were nearly all dead. We attribute this loss to over stocking the larval tank with food, causing an ammonia spike that resulted in a crash. This is a valuable lesson for us, and our next spawn will be split into multiple larval tanks to reduce the risk of loosing the entire batch. As of right now the female is holding eggs again, so we hope to update this post with progress and some baby shrimp pics!
The Hawaiian Harlequin shrimp differs from other Harlequin shrimp by the purple spots and yellow background. In my opinion, the Hawaiian shrimp are the most beautiful of this species. They are also harder to find, and are considered quite rare in the hobby. Our goal is to change that and make them easily accessible to anyone that wants them.
I've yet to catch the shrimp molting, however I did get lucky once and observe the actual spawning process. The male mates with the female multiple times after she has molted. We've captured this on video, which may be the first time it's been documented.
When the eggs are ready to hatch, they begin to hydrate with water and increase in size. This makes the female look much larger than normal. This is when it's time to move the female into our larvae extraction device, which is connected to the Vossen's Larval Trap.
This collection method was highly successful and we collected far more than expected. I estimate 1500 larval shrimp in this hatch, but it's anyone's guess. We transferred the entire batch to a larval tub with ease.
Our first larval run lasted for 6 days, and did very well till day 6. In the morning, they were all alive and doing well. I did a large harvest of copepods and baby brine shrimp to get them through the day, however when I came home from work 9 hours later, they were nearly all dead. We attribute this loss to over stocking the larval tank with food, causing an ammonia spike that resulted in a crash. This is a valuable lesson for us, and our next spawn will be split into multiple larval tanks to reduce the risk of loosing the entire batch. As of right now the female is holding eggs again, so we hope to update this post with progress and some baby shrimp pics!
