Skunk Cleaner Shrimp Larvae?!?

[Zakary2003]

It is 3am here. My skunk cleaner shrimp, which has full of eggs since its last molt, just released a bunch of larvae into the tank. They're so tiny and there are so many of them! The fish are all sleeping and nobody has started having a feeding frenzy, but my LPS and softies are enjoying the live food. Can I save any of them? What are the odds they will survive in my 20 gallon AIO?

 

[TangerineSpeedo]

I think they are one of the ones that have a fairly 1 in a 100 chance. I have a couple cleaners from a guy I know that I don't think does anything special. They just do...

 

[DaJMasta]

Without a dedicated setup to raise them, none will last more than a few hours. Even our regular circulation pumps will take care of that, though they'll be food for fish awake at night and corals.

If you want to try, you'll have a fair bit of setup to do and things to read up on, but if you've got two shrimp, you'll probably get two chances to catch and raise the larvae a month.

 

[Zakary2003]

If you want to try, you'll have a fair bit of setup to do and things to read up on, but if you've got two shrimp, you'll probably get two chances to catch and raise the larvae a month.

I only have one shrimp. I don't even know how it could produce live babies. I've had it for two months now, so I guess it could have mated before I got it.

 

[DaJMasta]

I would normally have expected them to spawn more frequently than that, but some animals can hold sperm for some time to fertilize subsequent batches of eggs, maybe they are one of them.

There's also a chance something else had spawned at the same time it molted and dropped it's eggs, hermits, other shrimp, and other crabs all hatch their larvae at similar times of the evening and they look somewhat similar.