Tag: fairy shrimp

Arizonafairyshrimp.com sells a batch of retail fairy shrimp eggs containing a variant that has an orange/red exoskeleton and legs instead of the usual white/clear. These are the same species, but one is the red variant and one is normal. They’re also, respectively, female and male, but I also have red males and normal females. Next batch, I’m gonna sort them by color before they mature and see if that red breeds true. Maybe even try to selectively breed for a bright red?

Fairy shrimp again! These are redtail fairy shrimp approaching adult size, most of them about 1.5cm long. The water is cloudy because that’s how you keep them fed, you make sure there are suspended particulates of food (yeast and algae) for them to filter out and eat. 

Also the old, hydra-infested tank. I think those must photosynthesize, they’ve been multiplying despite having no food in that tank. 

Video description and captions under the cut. 

[about a dozen small creatures are swimming in slightly murky water. The creatures resemble feathers with two black dots of eyes at one end and a slightly forked, red tailtip at the other end, and they swim around upside-down by waving a series of fine legs on their upward-facing bellies. They are swimming towards the surface of the water, where a light source is visible.]

“These are my fairy shrimp. Look how big they’ve gotten! Most of ‘em are over a centimeter long. Which is great, considering these things are born, like, a third of a millimeter long.” 

[camera pans back and forth to show the creatures, then lingers and follows a large one up the glass as it comes close.]

“Hello, shrimp. They’re in a different tank {referring to the fact that this tank is not the same as seen in previous videos} because the other one has hydras, which are little stinging things that eat these guys. And this girl-” 

[camera lingers on the largest shrimp, which has a tiny, pointed white pouch just visible behind the last set of legs]

“-this is big mama shrimp. You can just barely see she’s got a pouch full of eggs behind her legs, which the others don’t have.” 

[all the shrimp are now at the surface of the water, pressed against it and swimming slowly in no particular direction. One is startled by something, and jerks downward a few inches to get away, then slowly edges towards the surface. A few small round creatures are now visible, much smaller than the shrimp and moving in jerking patterns.]

“Still very attracted to light! As you can see here. Oop! Something scary happened, apparently. I got sixteen of ‘em, these are the ones that didn’t get eaten. There’s a daphnia, pretty much all the daphnia got eaten. But-” 

[camera zooms out to show the entire aquarium. It looks to be about a foot long and half that height, and is full of nothing but the shrimp, a vertically floating thermometer, and slightly greenish water]

“New tank, no more hydras. Old tank-” 

[camera pans to the side to show a slightly larger aquarium, this one with rocks, sand, and a clump of moss in it]

“-full of hydras! Like, I’m talkin’ hundreds of those things. Let’s see if I can film any.” 

[camera zooms in on the white sand, showing a few small, greenish creatures. The creatures are small, vertical, green stalks with a few tendrils coming off the upper end, and do not move. They are also anchored to a pink, speckled hunk of granite, and on the surface when the camera pans up to show that. Only a few are visible on the rocks and sand, but several dozen are attached to the surface.]

“Alright, you see those green lines in the substrate? Those are hydras. Those are the biggest ones, right there. More on the rock, aaand, here we go, those are hydras. They’re basically freshwater sea anemones. Aaaalll over the surface, all over the sand, all over the rocks. That’s why these guys are over here. But, hydras or not, they’re happy. And they’ve got eggs. Yay!”

Shrimp! Daphnia and fairy shrimp, mostly. Hopefully a mix of beavertail and fairy shrimp, but I can’t tell yet because they’re too young. 

Captions:

*video shows a number of small invertebrates swimming at the surface of an aquarium. Some are round and move in jerking motions, some are long, thin, and swimming upside-down by means of a large number of tiny legs that move in rippling motions. The round ones vastly outnumber the slender ones, at least a 4:1 ratio, but are smaller. The water around them is visibly cloudy, and all the round invertebrates are crowded near the surface, where a light is visible. Narrator is not visible.*

“This is actually a really good view. Here’s my assorted shrimp. Those are probably daphina at the surface, li’l poppy guys, and then the long ones with the li’l wiggly legs are fairy shrimp. And I just fed them, which is why the water’s kinda cloudy, they’re eating yeast. And they’re attracted to the light, which is why there’s all that popcorn [referring to the popping motions of the round invertebrates clustered at the surface] up there. Little fairy shrimp just kinda wiggling around. Those smaller ones that look kinda like short fairy shrimp are newer-hatched ones, a whole bunch of them hatched when I added new water ‘cos they thought it rained.” 

Minor correction: roughly 30 clam shrimp eggs, an unknown number of seed shrimp.
They’re all nauplii at the moment, basically larvae, which is why they all swim about the same. It’s a few days more before they start to look recognizable. Will add another video when they start looking like critters instead of swimming commas. If you look reeeeeal close in person, they have tiny whiskers, but it hurts your eyes trying.

A side-to-side pan on an aquarium full of slightly dirty water, then a zoom in on the contents. Many small, white objects, which strongly resemble commas and move in twitch-twitch-twitch motions, are swimming around inside. They appear to be less than a millimeter long, and a few which seem to be the size of large dust specks are visible. 

“This is a ten gallon tank into which I recently put a bag of detritus -fancy word for gunk- containing roughly 120 fairy shrimp eggs, 10 triop eggs, and 30 seed shrimp eggs. And here are results. They’re veeery small because most of them are probably less than 24 hours old, but aaaal those little dots -and there’s way more that the camera can’t even see- are critters. All the white ones are fairy shrimp, the orange ones, maybe I can find one that the phone can actually see, are triops. The seed shrimp are pretty much all way too small for the camera to pick up, there’s like 10 of them between those three big guys that aren’t showing up on here.” 

Camera focuses on a roughly two-centimeter-wide section between three of the dots, a space which is seemingly empty aside from two other dots, then pans to the side to show more dots just below the surface. 

“And there’s some more. That stuff on the surface (indicating what appears to be floating dirt) is what they eat, it’s mostly just leaves that have been in the water for a long time. More of it on the bottom. Those are not eggs, that’s just sand.” 

Camera pans down to a patch of dirt sprinkled with white sand grains, then off to the side, showing more dots. 

“More babies. Lots more babies. Lots lots lots more babies. There’s some more. Those are swimming a little bit differently (more smoothly), those might be the seed shrimp. I’m honestly not certain, at this point they’re basically impossible to tell apart, but… oh, that’s a triop, just about dead center. He’s orange, you can’t really tell in this video, but he’s orange.” 

Camera indicates a slightly orange dot, then lowers to a larger, white dot, which moves quickly in front of the camera. 

“I tried to put some of these in front of a microscope earlier, but they didn’t want to hold still and cooperate, so it didn’t work. Anyway, critters!”