Does anyone know of U.S. retailers with online presence who are doing business with these guys or their suppliers? I'm interested in freshwater invertebrates from the region other than the standard Atya gabonensis (vampire/blue wood shrimp), especially long-armed Macrobrachium prawns ... hard-pressed to find anyone else offering them on their lists.
Cameroon Aqua West/Central African oddball distributor
- Thread starter Veneer
- Start date
Don't know of anyone directly dealing with Cameroon. However, if it's long-arm prawns you're looking for (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) there are several breeding farms in the US. Just google either freshwater prawn for sale or macrobrachium rosenbergii for sale and you'll find Florida and Texas farms on the 1st page.
Thanks. I do have access to other Macrobrachium, including M. rosenbergii, but I'm specifically interested in establishing these African species (many of which are quite different from the usual Indo-Pacific offerings) in the U.S. hobby. Some of them have abbreviated freshwater larval development and others appear to be potentially undescribed species.
Cameroon-Aqua Cameroon price list from a few years back:
Other listings:
Cameroon-Aqua Cameroon price list from a few years back:
Other listings:
I'd be cautious about acquiring macs from Africa. M. rosenbergii are being cultured for food in many african countries. If you're sure of getting a species like M. vollenhovenii then it may be worth the venture.
If it were me, I'd be trying to acquire a species like M. lar from Tahiti. This is the largest of the Macrobrachiums. BTW, M. lar has established itself throughout Hawaii so it should be less effort to obtain these.
If it were me, I'd be trying to acquire a species like M. lar from Tahiti. This is the largest of the Macrobrachiums. BTW, M. lar has established itself throughout Hawaii so it should be less effort to obtain these.
RT 4 direct imports out of africa, give Mike a call I am sure if this stuff is available he would special order it for you but probably doesn't bring in regular do to low interest
Macrobrachium sp. "Blue Claws", if they consistently offer the same guys depicted in the photo on their website, is definitely M. vollenhovenii. Having seen images of some of the others and looked into localities of origin a bit, I think it's highly unlikely that any of them are aquacultured foreign species (though this can of course be a serious risk in other circumstances ... I know of people running into big disappointments like orders of Indonesian "Cherax", which they expected to be unusual animals from Irian Jaya but actually turned out to be misabeled color morphs of farm-raised North American Procambarus clarkii).
I'd like to try M. lar at some point in the future, too (it occurs throughout the Indo-Pacific as far west as mainland East Africa and fairly regularly shows up on Indonesian and Taiwan lists ... though I agree that the introduced populations in Hawaii are the most obvious place to get them), but I'm presently pretty set on trying to source species from the Atlantic drainages of Africa. It's actually the M. carcinus/M. americanum species pair (sister to M. vollenhovenii) that are the largest and heftiest members of the genus, and they're definitely very enjoyable to keep in captivity (I've collected them in Puerto Rico and Panama in the past). That said, I'm interested in even the smaller and less immediately spectacular W. African Macrobrachium (and also smaller freshwater palaemonids from the area like Desmocaris).
Huge Venezuelan M. carcinus (after the small shrimp at the beginning, which is actually a member of the M. olfersi complex and not a young carcinus at all):
[video=youtube;6UPyFHJkUII]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UPyFHJkUII[/video]
Cool, thanks for the tip.