How do I breed ghost shrimp I really want to?

[Daveo]

Well How do I do that sort of thing because they are expensive and I would like to feed them to some of My fish to see if they like the tast or it would be a cool addition Thanks

Daveo

 

[BigLou]

I've read that breeding them isn't real hard, but raising/feeding the fry is the problem with successful shrimp raising.

 

[Tempestuousfury]

It took me two minutes to read that post, what with that crazy avatar.

You can get ghost shrimp that already have eggs. The problem is definitely raising them. Can you get a five gallon tank and a sponge filter going? A bucket full of infusoria?

 

[Daveo]

A bucket full of infusoria?

Yah but what is that?

Daveo

 

[LiquidLife]

We raise ghost shrimps but not as a food source since we estimate it would take a hundred fertile females (in a big tank) to provide a constant feasible food source. Plus, ghosts only live about 18 months so you'd constantly have to replenish the breeders and it takes them about 6 months to mature to breeding. Other people say they have had baby ghosts in basically bare tanks but our shrimp tanks are all heavily planted (mostly floated plants and lots of java moss) so the babies have places to hide and to encourage infusoria to exist. Infusoria are plankton--one-celled critters that live in water and thrive on plant matter (you can make some by letting a lettuce leaf sit in a glass of water in the sun for a few days) and a lot of baby aquatic critters live on them until the babies get big enough to handle bigger food stuff. Once they are mini-adults, they become extremely fast and are real difficult to catch (unless you do have a bare tank)--our mini-adults always go into hiding for about the next 3-4 weeks until they get big enough to feel they can defend themselves.

One fertile ghost female will only produce an average (and I'm guessing) of maybe 25 babies (give or take a some and that's only if all the eggs hatch) per clutch and it takes about 4 weeks for a clutch to mature to hatching. The newborns will hang in the water for about two weeks until they moult into their mini-adult shape and all that time they will need to be able to feed on the stuff floating by in the water. We augment when we have lots of babies with Liquifry and the plankton size Golden Pearls.

And through all this you'd have to maintain the water quality so you don't have a mass die-out. For us, it's just easier to feed the fish defrosted mysis shrimp and other things.

 

[Tempestuousfury]

The infusoria would be the lettuce in the water just mentioned.