Peppermint Prop

[AndrewB]

I have a customer who purchased a "berried" peppermint shrimp (carrying eggs on its swimming legs). Apparently several days after introduction into the aquarium, the eggs hatched. He has no micro-predators (just a pair of jawfish and a pair of maroon clowns) and is now reporting that the largest are coming on 5mm and starting to turn red. They are also starting to settle onto the substrate. The tank is fed DT's Premium Reef Blend and frozen Cyclop-Eeze every other day. There's no sump on the system. Otherwise the tank is a farily standard reef tank with MH/PC combo lighting, live rock, and soft and LPS corals.

 

It's kind of ironic actually; he's hoping to keep a green mandarin but keeps waiting for the micro fauna population to grow. With the baby peps it doesn't appear that the other critters are populating quickly enough and he doesn't want to destroy the "nursery" full of shrimp anyway.

 

I'm hoping that he will bring me a specimen or two to look at under the scope to be sure of the ID of the critters but the red coloration certainly leads me to believe that it is not an explosively-growing population of Mysis.

 

Has anyone here raised these from eggs to adult?

[dhoch]

I did, and have done a lot of research into this.

 

How long have the peps fry been alive?

 

Typically there is a critical phase around (as I recall) 20 days and then again at 40 days.

 

Dave

[AndrewB]

He's at about 30 days so apparently past the first critical phase. Any suggestions for the second critical phase?

[treesprite]

one of the pepps in my office tank appears to be pregnant I have no clue what to expect out of it

[dhoch]

treesprite,

 

Babies is what to expect, but don't expect to get them to full grown maturity.

 

Here is an article... looks like 40-65 days is settlement time (and that's the hard time to get them through).

 

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2002-10/nftt/

 

Dave

[treesprite]

thanks for the link. I kept trying to find good articles on it and found nothing I was looking for, so this was helpful.

[dbartco]

I have my doubts. One of the speaker's talk at macna could not get a single scientific paper documenting these done in captivity. There was one co in the UK that claimed they had it, but it wasn't easy and they wouldn't divulge the method. I doubt he has that many scurrying around the tank by luck on cyclopeese (but I would even say never..).

[dhoch]

Actually doug, that was for skunk cleaners. Peppermint's have been well documented as being raised through.

 

Dave

[ctenophore]

Andy Rhyne at UF was the speaker at macna. He does research raising peppermints, I believe he has successfully raised them to adulthood. He was mentioning that artemac is a pretty good food choice, but there was another new one that was supposed to be better (Otohime out of Japan, sold by reed mariculture in the US). You can reach him at arhyne at ufl dot edu

 

Justin

 

Oh wait, Rhyne may have been at IMAC. I forget the macna speaker's name, but I don't think his presentation was specifically about wurdemanni.

[jason the filter freak]

sounds interesting if he can keep it going