Tiger Pistol shrimp breeding

[phaedraeos]

I have a pair of Tiger Pistols in my 45g, and the female is holding a nice, fat load of eggs! Has anyone had any success breeding these guys, either intentionally or accidentally? Mine are currently living in happy harmony with their Wheeler's Goby, a pair of false Percs and their BTA, a Royal Gramma, and a baby Foxfaced Lo.

 

[Tennyson]

I don't think there are any records of breeding these shrimp. But you could research it on google, chance are though, that no one has attempted to breed these shrimp.

If you have experience with breeding shrimp, you could try to raise them yourselves. They would probably accept baby brine shrimp, or live copepods and other small and hard to culture live foods.

Keep us updated, if your interested, I'd be glad to help you out even though I have never tried pistol shrimps, I have good experience with breeding peppermints.

 

[phaedraeos]

Well, whatever they do they'll probably have to do on their own. I'm not interested in taking them out of the tank, especially since they seem to be doing so well in there!

If you had any tips with your peppermints, I'd love to hear them. I'm wondering specifically how long your females held their eggs for, since I think mine has had hers for at least a month.

Thanks!

 

[Chad Vossen]

id recommend trying to raise the pistol shrimp as you would peppermint shrimp.

10 gal tank, sides painted black, front covered with black paper. fill it half way, air stone in the corner on low. siphon detritus daily and top off with tank water from your reef (doubles as a water change on the reef). feed them newly hatched brine shrimp and offer small frozen foods in case they are aggressive feeders. if they take frozen foods, your life got a bit easier. i fed my peppermint shrimp larvae cyclopeeze for the first week, then started feeding frozen mysis and frozen brine shrimp with the occasional cyclopeeze feeding. im sure i could have had many more than 3 if i hadn't run into super high alkalinity issues in the main reef tank.

thats my advise, and ill be interested to see what tennyson has to add.

 

[dzeadow]

Check out www.projectdibs.com I think someone on there or on www.marinebreeder.org got some of their fry to go through several morph phases but slowly got widdled down from many to few. There were pics and everything.... ah, here it is:

http://www.marinebreeder.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=6536&sid=e7a6b88e30bfcf39bf6bf9ab61efedf7

 

[phaedraeos]

Excellent info, thanks so much!

For better or worse, I have confirmed ich in my reef tank so all fish will soon be quarantined and the tank will run fallow for at least 2 months. I'm wondering now if this could lead to a few surviving hatchlings?

As of a couple of days ago, the female is still holding her eggs. I'm not sure if this batch will survive though: In a state of complete idiocy I did a partial treatment to my show tank with Life-Bearer (I have flukes in one of my freshwater tanks, saw a fish flashing, and acted without thinking), and lost two peppermint shrimp and a fire shrimp. The pistols seem to have made it through without incident, although I'm not sure that the eggs are still viable.

I'll definately keep people up to date if there is any news!

 

[dzeadow]

my pistols survived some crazy stuff. I unhooked their tank from the main system when doing a change over not thinking that there was no heat in that tank.. for 24hrs. the water was freezing cold. I lifted up the rocks and they were no where to be found. when I started scooping out sand, out popped both tigers! They had burrowed under the sand to keep warm... crazy thugs!