I've done it for H. zosterae, and think that the larvae stage is a great food. Generally I was collecting about a dozen grass shrimp (more marine version of ghosts, Palaemonetes vulgaris was the species I was using) and held the adults in the fuge area and fed them leftover mysis, flakes, etc. They are capable of sustaining themselves off of very little but they will not reproduce well.
Females holding eggs would be transfered to 'birthing' buckets that were basically floating trays with holes (baskets with small holes would work too) that the female would go into and the babies would be allowed to flow out. She will eat her young in many cases, sometimes not. I could never figure out under what conditions the females would cannibalize.
I treated the entire population in the beginning of culture for bacterial and parasitic infections, using the same sort of meds you might use on the SH. I did not see any cases of parasitism with fry or adult zosterae, but I didnt do it very long either, or with a very large pool of SH.
I also did long term freshwater dips on these shrimp to try to limit the types of parasites capable of staying alive in the animals and would hold them in fairly low salinity (10-15ppt) in culture tanks to also combat any potential problems.
It is possible to order these shrimp from aquaculturestore.com and a few other sources.
Ah yes, I typically held the larvae a day or to and would feed greenwater, rotifers and such, or perhaps non-live powdered enrichments or shrimp feed to try to get them to increase the nutritional content. I do not know what their nutritional profile is like without enrichment, but this is certainly a food item SH would encounter in the wild, along with Mysidopsis so it must be a fairly decent food for them, at the veryleast better than Artemia.
Last thought, it takes a very very long time to grow up the larval staged shrimp into adults so its easiest to hold the adults for several months, until breeding declines, and then add to the population. Juvenile large species of SH take the larvae very well, adults have to be 'trained' to recognize them as food in the water column but will feed on them, and fry show great interest.
>Sarah
