# Suicide Fan shrimp



## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

I was completely horrified to find one of my male Flower shrimp lying on the carpet this morning, at least ten feet from the tank.. deceased, sadly.

I'm even more amazed neither of my cats ate the poor thing.. but he was whole, lying on his side and since the carpet is brown, he blended right in just like he did with the driftwood. At first I thought it was a kitty furball, but it wasn't.. 

What I can't figure is how in blazes he got out in the first place and how he got so far away in the second place.

I have another male, so my faint hopes they may one day breed have not vanished entirely, but of all the creatures I keep, this is not the one I'd have pegged for the suicide leap. Depressing.


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## zfarsh (Apr 7, 2011)

same thing hapened to all my fan shrimp, they eventually, after time, came out of the tank and their bodies found... No more fans for me i guess.


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## bettaforu (Sep 6, 2009)

I think what happens is they get up too close to the spray from the filters as this is where they fan for food....sometimes if they crawl up the sides or the intake they get too close to the top and ooops, over they go. 

I too have had one do that! Its sad but it does happen.


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## splur (May 11, 2011)

Is your tank open top?


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Yeah it is open, at the moment. I've had this guy for the best part of five months, with two others, and I got two more females after that, because I found two of the first three were male and I though just one female to two guys was not such a good combo. 

I'm building a new hood for this tank. Though it's not been blazing hot the past couple days, I've had the old hood off since the heat began, as it's the only way to get access for a fan, and I didn't take the fan off, since I'm sure the heat will return. I plan to build in a fan to the new hood as well as more light.. just don't have it finished yet. 

But there's about two inches of bare glass above the water... so the snails have a spawning area... and I can't figure how he got over the bare glass.. Though they do like to hang on a sponge I have suctioned to the side.. used to be part of a filter and they like picking at it, so I left it in to keep the biofilm alive. I suppose he could have climbed onto the top of that and used it to support a climb out. He was about 3 inches long so he could have stood on it, I guess. Damn though, they have been feeding quite contentedly, near as I can tell.. I mean, how can we know what shrimp think ? but they'd all be hanging on that sponge feeding for hours on end, it's right in the sweet spot for the pump flow which they enjoy. Really depressing. Hopefully I get the hood done soon. It is turning out to be a bigger project than I imagined, but I got a small one fixed for one tank, so now I can work full time on the larger one.

I don't have a canister filter.. it's an Aqua Clear 70, so I very much doubt he could have used any part of it to climb out.. too slippery and besides the outflow they feed in is from a Koralia nano pump, so they are almost never anywhere near the filter.


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## zfarsh (Apr 7, 2011)

About the female male thing, what does it matter which one do you get anyways?


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## chinamon (Jun 16, 2012)

zfarsh said:


> About the female male thing, what does it matter which one do you get anyways?


if im correct, i believe one male and one female are required for breeding.


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## zfarsh (Apr 7, 2011)

yea, but you need brinesh water for the larvae to develop, unlike RCS / CRS or Ghost Shrimps... Normally, this is difficult, and thus fan shrimps are wild caught.


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## default (May 28, 2011)

From experience:
Have you taken anything out of the tank lately? Plants? Hard scrapes? Nets? Anything that was within the tank beforehand?
These guys don't let go sometimes and follow whatever you take out and possibly could of jumped right onto the floor after it was taken out.

Also ive seen these guys semi jump... Although quite sluggish.
However if they are climbing/jumping out, you have issues towards the happiness of the fan shrimps.
They need a good source of flow with enough food in the water column.
They've only been reported to 'escape' when they lack the required.


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## zfarsh (Apr 7, 2011)

I also figured that mine jumped because there were not happy ... but didnt know what to do about it. I mean how do you ensure there is food coming out of the discharge of the filter, when you have fine filter and the sort?


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## default (May 28, 2011)

zfarsh said:


> I also figured that mine jumped because there were not happy ... but didnt know what to do about it. I mean how do you ensure there is food coming out of the discharge of the filter, when you have fine filter and the sort?


there usually is enough food in the water column for them to feed on, however if your tank is extremely clean, with no free floating algae of any sort, then you need to target feed the shrimps. people use soaked fish food with eye droppers to target feed.. too much work personally.

i usually like to use a powerhead to direct flow onto a certain spot and when any particle of food gets into the powerhead it just gets chopped finer and shot out.


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Well, there are lot more plants in there now, than there were, extras I got for a new tank I'm setting up. But normally they like plants and often use them for support to hang in the current to feed. 

And you can't ensure there is enough food for them in the discharge of a filter, not really. What they eat is stuff like infusoria and single cell algaes. They can get the infusoria from a well matured tank, but what I've been doing is feeding them a couple of 50 cc syringes full of cultured single cell algae, or Golden Pearls in the 5 - 50 micron size, or a couple of different brands of liquid invert food, Kent's Phyto and I forget the other one. I switch from one to the other, but the Golden Pearls are designed specifically for filter feeders in this size and will stay suspended in the water column for much longer than other foods will, not sinking to the bottom for at least a half hour or more. Sometimes I turn off the filter and just let the pump circulate the food around the tank for an hour or so. I have clams as well, and they need the same foods, but down at the substrate level, so for them I also use a gadget called a Sea Squirt, which is basically a very long, skinny turkey baster type of thing, that allows me to target any liquid foods virtually on top of the clams. I can also use it, or the syringe, to inject food just in front of the shrimp, so they get a solid chance at the food. The rest of the time they are feeding on infusoria, sieving it out of the water column too. One reason a newly set up tank is not good for filter feeders is that it won't have much, if any, infusoria in it. They take time to become established. Fan shrimp can also feed off the bottom, but if they spend much time doing that it often means there is not enough food for them in the water column. Since I've been supplementing with the liquid algae and other things, mine rarely feed off the tank bottom. They filter feed almost all the time, which is, from what I have been able to learn, the best thing for them.

As for the breeding, well, yeah, it's not easy, and I don't honestly know if it's ever been done in captivity, but I can't see why I shouldn't try, should I be fortunate enough to get a berried female. If I got one, I'd sure try to hatch the eggs. I already plan to try to hatch Whisker shrimp eggs and Amano shrimp eggs, who need the same conditions for hatching, and I might even try hatching some nerite snails once I get the brackish tank set up. What's to lose ? Hence my wish to have a reasonable ratio of females to males, in hopes that when they are mature enough, I might get a berried female. I don't even know if they have larvae or whether their eggs hatch into tiny versions of the adults. Part of the challenge, which I enjoy.

It would not surprise me if these shrimp in the wild occasionally decide to change their local habitat, perhaps by switching from one pond or stream branch to another, and if it's a short distance, they might well do it over land. Octopus are known for this behaviour, as are some fish, though not many.. mud skippers, if I recall correctly, are the only ones that really travel any distance over land. But many critters can survive varying lengths of time out of water, provided it's not too long.

Still really depressing to have the shrimp go walkabout when I wasn't around to catch him at it. I had two males, one of which had much stouter legs than the other. I kind of figured the one with the biggest legs was the dominant one.. some accounts say that the dominant males turn red once they reach sexual maturity or perhaps just once they are in breeding condition. But since the one shrimp jumped, I have not seen the other male, so I don't know which one is dead. Nor have I seen the two smaller females, or even the miniature Golden fan shrimp I have. Usually they are all hanging together, often on top of each other, near or on the sponge which places them right in the sweet spot of the Nano pump current.. I hope they're hanging in the extra plants and I'm just having trouble seeing them. I have a huge wad of extra plants in that tank just at the moment, waiting on another tank they are destined for. But I have to reseal it first.


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## zfarsh (Apr 7, 2011)

hey fishfur, if you ever are able to make the eggs hatch, pls let me know, i might wanna buy some from you (the amanos too). I preffer buying the ones reproduced at home then caught in the wild.


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Hey zfarsh, me too. And believe me, if I have ANY luck at breeding any of these, everybody will know, I will be crowing loud and proud  !.. and if I have more than beginners luck I'll be selling them for sure. I have Ghosts now that are big enough to sell, unless they're wanted for feeders, in which case they're still too small. First time I ever tried to raise any kind of fry other than live bearers, and it turned out pretty well. But brackish water adds a whole level of difficulty I am not used to. But I do like a challenge, so I'm going to give it a shot. I don't think my Amanos are old enough yet, but they should be soon. No way to know about the flower shrimp, estimates on their breeding age are virtually non existent. So I'll just have to wait.. something I dislike but sometimes you have no choice but to be patient.


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## default (May 28, 2011)

Best of luck on the breeding.
But I don't want to be a party pooper, but the setup required to mimick the natural effect of brackish water for Amanos can be very difficult and expensive.
I have tons of Amanos, ranging from 1-2.5" and they always carry thousands of eggs.
You might get lucky though! There's just a lot of transferring, waiting, and observing.
Get a few tanks with different salinity levels, and don't be too let down if there are deaths to adults until you find a correct level.
Good luck


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Thanks.. and if you have any advice on the brackish tanks, I'd be pleased to have it. I've actually asked on the general marine forum here but got no answers. If I added up every Ghost shrimp egg that was released and compared that number to how many live new Ghost shrimp I now have, there's a HUGE discrepancy. I have no illusions about getting huge broods and having them all survive. Temp's turned out to be fairly crucial to the Ghosts success, and I am sure other species will have their own unique requirements and I will be pretty much doing trial and error.. and keeping records. But there are a couple of sites with some good info on previous successes with Amanos.. I just don't have room for a lot of big tanks. They'll have to be small and as few as I can manage to get away with, unless I just turn my living room into a fish room instead... but somehow I don't quite see that happening . But I've never done salt at all, so it's going to be quite new to me.


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Slight update.. one of the flower shrimp moulted last night, and the shell is a large one, I hope it was the other male I was having trouble finding. If so, he will be hiding for a day or three, based on previous moulting behaviour. So that's some good news, at least.


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