I don't know when, but recently Tim ordered 25 cherry shrimp for $25 dollars off the internet. His brother had purchased a few from the same website, so Tim was excited to follow in line. They came in the mail today and when I got the package and opened it up, I was not expecting what I saw. I guess I had been expecting older shrimp that were 2 or 3 cm long, but these were tiny little babies. I was shocked, and I put their bag to float in the fish tank so Tim could come home and deal with it instead of me. I told Tim over AIM that the shrimp were a lot smaller than I had expected. I was afraid that if we released them into our tank, the other fish would snap them up in an instant. We keep buying shrimp and then they either die or get eaten and it's becoming a tiring cycle. The bright side is that each time we fail, we learn something new about shrimp care. We just recently discovered that shrimp can't deal with big changes; whenever we added water from the tap, we changed the pH of the tank and killed them off. I guess we figured we'd give it another stab when we found shrimp that were $1 offline rather than $5 in the store. Tim was still at school when the shrimpies arrived, so we decided he would bike to the fish store and Navi and I would walk and meet him there and figure out what to do. After some time at the fish store, we came to a final solution and ended up walking back home with a new 5 gallon hexagon tank that is our new baby tank. We are going to try to raise baby shrimp and baby fish in this tank until they are big enough to survive the main tank. When we got home, we started to set up this new tank and get it ready for the baby shrimp. Tim became worried that the new tank would have high levels of ammonia and kill the new baby shrimp, so he wanted to go to petsmart and buy a test kit so that he can watch the chemical levels. He also wanted to buy a few hardy fish to put in it so that good bacteria can grow and start the tank's ecosystem in a healthier way. So we went off to petsmart, and ended up buying even more fishy stuff. We bought a small heater for the tank, a chemical testing kit, three sunburst platies to cycle the new tank, and I don't remember what else. On our way out, I noticed some really cute ghost shrimp and of course I fell in love. They were only 33 cents, which made them even more irresistable. They were adult sized, so of course this meant that we had to get ten of them for the main tank.
After we got back home, we finished fixing up the two tanks. We are currently floating the shrimp in a little baby isolation box before we release them into the new tank completely. This way, if something does go wrong, we can just pick them all up in their floating box, and float them in the main tank. The baby cherry shrimp are very cute, turning redder as I type, and scampering around everywhere. Even Navi likes the fish tank! She will sit in front of it and her eyes will trace where fish are swimming. She will follow the path that fishies take across the tank with her eyes. Sometimes Navi will get more excited than usual, and if a fish is swimming across the tank, she will her lick her way across the other side of the glass. It is very cute. It's cute enough that I don't mind always having to clean the fish tank glass because of it. So now we have 35 shrimp of all different sizes. I really like the ghost shrimp. Their eyes stick out from their head, which I've never seen on a shrimp before. It's like those little nubbies on the top of a giraffe's head that serve no obvious purpose, but with eyes at the end! Now that I think of it, they remind me of crabs with their eyes out on little antennas. They also truly live up to their name of ghost shrimp; when you first sit down in front of the tank to search for some, you cannot find any at all! Then over time, they slowly start to appear and then you see more and more! Some of them even have red marks on their antennas and front legs. Others don't. I'm not sure what the difference is, but maybe it is the difference between males and females. Maybe they will breed, and we'll have ghost shrimp babies! That would be a lot of fun.
After we got back home, we finished fixing up the two tanks. We are currently floating the shrimp in a little baby isolation box before we release them into the new tank completely. This way, if something does go wrong, we can just pick them all up in their floating box, and float them in the main tank. The baby cherry shrimp are very cute, turning redder as I type, and scampering around everywhere. Even Navi likes the fish tank! She will sit in front of it and her eyes will trace where fish are swimming. She will follow the path that fishies take across the tank with her eyes. Sometimes Navi will get more excited than usual, and if a fish is swimming across the tank, she will her lick her way across the other side of the glass. It is very cute. It's cute enough that I don't mind always having to clean the fish tank glass because of it. So now we have 35 shrimp of all different sizes. I really like the ghost shrimp. Their eyes stick out from their head, which I've never seen on a shrimp before. It's like those little nubbies on the top of a giraffe's head that serve no obvious purpose, but with eyes at the end! Now that I think of it, they remind me of crabs with their eyes out on little antennas. They also truly live up to their name of ghost shrimp; when you first sit down in front of the tank to search for some, you cannot find any at all! Then over time, they slowly start to appear and then you see more and more! Some of them even have red marks on their antennas and front legs. Others don't. I'm not sure what the difference is, but maybe it is the difference between males and females. Maybe they will breed, and we'll have ghost shrimp babies! That would be a lot of fun.
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