Peppermint Shrimp

Gtinnel · Mar 31, 2022

I am starting to have some aiptasia in my tank and I decided I was going to pick up a few peppermint shrimp. I realize there are many species sold as peppermint shrimp and some will eat coral.
I ordered them from Reefcleaners and I’m trying to decide if they are the safer species and if I should put them in the tank or the sump.
I’ve seen the picture to help id different species but I still have no idea which type they are. Anyone here that is good at telling apart different species from horrible phone pics?

sfin52 · Mar 31, 2022

Gtinnel said:
I am starting to have some aiptasia in my tank and I decided I was going to pick up a few peppermint shrimp. I realize there are many species sold as peppermint shrimp and some will eat coral.
I ordered them from Reefcleaners and I’m trying to decide if they are the safer species and if I should put them in the tank or the sump.
I’ve seen the picture to help id different species but I still have no idea which type they are. Anyone here that is good at telling apart different species from horrible phone pics?

Reef cleaners is pretty spot on.

Gtinnel · Mar 31, 2022

sfin52 said:
Reef cleaners is pretty spot on.

I had asked John a while back what species they were and he send me an article about a change in the classification of peppermint shrimp, but I can’t find the article now.

sfin52 · Mar 31, 2022

Gtinnel said:
I had asked John a while back what species they were and he send me an article about a change in the classification of peppermint shrimp, but I can’t find the article now.

They algea barn they had a decent write up. I'll try to find it again

sfin52 · Mar 31, 2022

Shrimp ID - wundermanni or rahbunae

Hello, I'm have some questions about a shrimp that i got, if it's a wundermanni or rathbunae. Could you be so nice to help with this ID? Youtube short video: Thanks!

www.reef2reef.com

Utubereefer · Mar 31, 2022

sfin52 · Mar 31, 2022

Utubereefer said:

piranhaman00 · Mar 31, 2022

I wish this would get stickied or something.

All peppermint shrimp eat coral, there is no safe version, they all eat coral and they all prefer coral ime.

Gtinnel · Mar 31, 2022

piranhaman00 said:
I wish this would get stickied or something.

All peppermint shrimp eat coral, there is no safe version, they all eat coral and they all prefer coral ime.

I see this same thing repeated online but I also saw plenty of people who reported that they never had an issue with them, and I’ve talked to a few lfs that keep them in their frag tanks. So I’m not sure if the “better” ones are from a different species or if it has more to do with individual shrimp.

jfoahs04 · Mar 31, 2022

Gtinnel said:
I am starting to have some aiptasia in my tank and I decided I was going to pick up a few peppermint shrimp. I realize there are many species sold as peppermint shrimp and some will eat coral.
I ordered them from Reefcleaners and I’m trying to decide if they are the safer species and if I should put them in the tank or the sump.
I’ve seen the picture to help id different species but I still have no idea which type they are. Anyone here that is good at telling apart different species from horrible phone pics?

Reef cleaners is good about sending L. Wundermanni. I have one from John too. Give it some time, it may not go for your aiptasia for a few weeks. If you have large aiptasia, yours still may not go for it. I've seen mine go for some very small aiptasia (and likely takes care of babies I can't even see), but it hasn't toughed the larger ones. I've had zero issue with mine going for coral - I overfeed, so if it anything it's not doing as much searching for food as it normally would.

jda · Mar 31, 2022

Real peppermint shrimp are not coral eaters. They will if you starve them and so would any of us. I replace mine about every three years and they never have eaten coral, but I also don't just leave them to eat only fish poo. I get mine from the Keys from ReefTopia.

Mine have always eaten aips, but I do have to still kill the larger ones with kalk paste.

Those do look like Wurdemanni to me.

DeniseAndy · Mar 31, 2022

Never had one of my peppermint eat a coral. I have had them take food from corals and irritate a clam, but never eat coral. I have almost always gotten mine as captive bred or from KP Aquatics. Never have aiptasia problems in tanks with these guys.

ninjamyst · Mar 31, 2022

I always quarantine the peppermint shrimp in breeder box and give it frags with aiptasia on it. If I have a rock with aiptasia, I take rock out and put it in a bucket with the peppermint. Obviously this doesn't work all the time if you have.corals encrusted on rock or can't remove rock. But every time I release peppermint shrimp into the tank, they disappear and I never see them again and aiptasia.remains.

Gtinnel · Mar 31, 2022

Very few of the rocks in my tank are able to be removed easily. There is a fair chance my wrasse will make a meal of the shrimp, which is the reason I went the cheap route and bought shrimp from reef cleaners instead of buying the more expensive captive bred ones.

DeniseAndy · Mar 31, 2022

I hear you on the wrasse issue. I have that with my large tank. My smaller ones no wrasses.

Auquanut · Mar 31, 2022

jda said:
Real peppermint shrimp are not coral eaters. They will if you starve them and so would any of us. I replace mine about every three years and they never have eaten coral, but I also don't just leave them to eat only fish poo. I get mine from the Keys from ReefTopia.

Mine have always eaten aips, but I do have to still kill the larger ones with kalk paste.

Those do look like Wurdemanni to me.

This sounds about right. When I had my biocube running, I had a long-term peppermint shrimp that was very effective and never bothered coral. One night I caught him pulling polyps out of a hammer. I shooed him away, and he never did it again. In hindsight, I'll bet he was just underfed. In the end, the hammer outlived the shrimp, and a portion of it still lives in the 125.

Gtinnel · Mar 31, 2022

Auquanut said:
This sounds about right. When I had my biocube running, I had a long-term peppermint shrimp that was very effective and never bothered coral. One night I caught him pulling polyps out of a hammer. I shooed him away, and he never did it again. In hindsight, I'll bet he was just underfed. In the end, the hammer outlived the shrimp, and a portion of it still lives in the 125.

I had a emerald crab start eating corals and looking back at it he had very little algae to eat. I also had a copperband butterfly that started eating hammer corals after I couldn’t get it to eat anything else.
As mentioned by @jda I can’t blame an animal for eating coral if it’s starving.
I plan on feeding pellets to the shrimp…if they survive the wrasse that is.

cww81 · Mar 31, 2022

I once had a peppermint shrimp pull a rock flower anemone off the rock and take it back to his cave, safe to say they can eat coral but this was the only thing he touched and this was a few days after I introduced him. He never messed with anything else after that and I just assume he really liked rock flowers or was underfed when I got him.

ROB2005 · Mar 31, 2022

Haven’t bought them in a little while. It was fun to see when they would be loaded with peppermint fry and they then scatter them all over the tank and it was a feeding frenzy.

jda · Mar 31, 2022

I put them in a frag tank or fuge until they have molted once. This gets them used to catching prepared foods (flake food usually for me), larger and fully prepared for captivity. I have not had great luck just throwing them into the display without doing this. I have a cuban hog in that tank that constantly thinks that it can get them, but they can keep away from him. I get them 20 at a time and they come in a bit smaller, but in a month or six weeks they usually molt and are an inch long, or so.