I SEE BABIES!!!

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
dang it...just lost one of the guys i believe last night..he jumped out the tank...=(

so im left with the female and the big daddy....



does anyone know if they will eat their babies??
 
madehtsobi;2622122; said:
does anyone know if they will eat their babies??
They definately will eat them. You should try & remove the male once the female is in berry. Once she releases the young, she should be removed from the tank.
 
awesome!
 
waaaaahhhhh that thing is beastly
 
ok so someone is going to have to help me...I just bought something similar to that...(they listed him as a prawn, but i have no idea what he his)...he is a dark brown with the only color difference being the orange in his claws. Other than the color though, every thing is the exact same. What exactly is he?
 
Nice Prawns!!! The babies need to live in some sort of brakish/salt water when they born because they are like plankton
 
Yabbadoo;2623892; said:
They definately will eat them. You should try & remove the male once the female is in berry. Once she releases the young, she should be removed from the tank.


thanks yabba!!! :D

i need more tanks!!! lol
 
This is a Malaysian giant river prawn -- recently reclassified as Macrobrachium dacqueti but referred to in most available literature as M. rosenbergii. The young will be planktonic and probably too small for the parents to pay much heed to -- that's the good news. The bad news is that they will require brackish water and undergo 11 larval stages before becoming post-larvae (recognizable juveniles that walk on the bottom as opposed to floating in the water column).

That's not to say that there is no hope of rearing them; this species is one of the most widely aquacultured freshwater crustaceans, with farms from New Zealand to Israel, and breeding is routine. Consult this manual (especially this part) for some background.

Other species of shrimp with similar lifecycles (algae-eating Amano shrimp) have been successfully bred by aquarists: see this page and this page.

I strongly encourage you to attempt to go ahead with raising the young shrimp (this has rarely been done with Macrobrachium by the average aquarium-owner, but the payoffs can be immense -- the number of eggs per spawn can be as high as 75,000). When the eggs turn gray, they'll be close to hatching:

y4100e11.jpg


You can opt to isolate the female and then A) place the young into an already-established brackish tank or B) add salt to this holding tank. I would guess that siphoning them from the main aquarium would more labor-intensive (though their likely attraction to light might help out), and larvae would be lost if exposed to a running power filter.

A salinity of around 12 ppt seems to work well; once they become post-larvae (miniature adults), they can be acclimated back to freshwater at your leisure ... being euryhaline, even adults can tolerate full saltwater. Baby brine shrimp or very fine commercial food can be used. Airstones or possibly a sponge filter should be the strongest water circulation you should use.
 
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