preggo peppermint!

[beelzebob]

so over the past two months i have been setting up an 18 gallon tank for a mantis shrimp.

two weeks ago my levels all hit zero, and a week later i got a couple emerald crabs and a peppermint shrimp.

they are all gonna be food, and i primarily just got the pepermint shrimp to clean up aptasia before i but tthe mantis or any corals in.

last night i noticed the pepermint shrip is loaded with eggs.

and that leaves me with a couple Q's

how long does it take for those things to gestate?
is it plasable to try and keep the hatch?
how would i go about trying to do so?

i intended for her to just get bashed when the mantis went in this weekend, but now i feel like a dick.

 

[Hoobahans]

Peppermints frequently carry around eggs, but they rarerly hatch. I have five peppermints in my 24g and they only hatched once. It happened when my roommate accidentally topped off the tank with my alk buffer which raised the alkalinity to 18 dkh. It might be unrealted, but in a few hours one of my two females who was carrying at the time released the eggs and they hatched into litterly thousands of baby shrimp...which were nearly incapable of swimming and proved easy food for my clown and skimmer. If you do a google search you can find a pretty interesting article about some researchers who do it. Chances are, however, that they wont ever hatch.