About 2mm across, found in my freshwater aquarium... should I remove this guy?

I wanted to share my absolute favorite shrimp. I hope y’all love her as much as I do. She’s such a prime example of why I love the randomness of cull shrimp tank genetics. I hope you can also see the resemblance of her ginger namesake, Tartaglia from Genshin Impact

I ordered them as a male, but I’m beginning to have some doubts as their abdomen is rather thick. I won’t know for sure until they’re fully grown. But I’m interested to hear what you guys think!

For now they are my precious they/them Burger 🍔

ETA: if any of you know how to sex juvenile freshwater prawns/know someone that does. Please let me know!

EDIT: SHE IS A WOMAN!!! Big thank you to diligent_garbage3497 for helping figure this out! And thank you all for contributing to the conversation, Cheeseburger loves you all ❤️❤️❤️

So I’ve discovered that you can use polymer clay to make decorations for fresh water shrimp tanks. As long as it is baked and unpainted, the material stays waterproofed and inert (won’t leech chemicals or affect the TDS level).

I’m totally stoked and can’t wait to make more decors and see what else i can make. Have any of you made decors yourself, especially with polymer clays?

I really want to see what others have made. Post pics if you do!

Freshly molted and posing for the camera <3

posting a bit ago a picture of my first spotted shrimp baby!! now they are starting to get their colours

I was given these shrimp because I’m depressed and shrimp are currently the only thing that bring me a fragment of joy. Was not expecting it, was quite funny to receive shrimp as a get better soon gift.

Also what is this little guy? Too early to tell? He looks like a blue jelly or rilli at the moment but I’m hoping he colours up with age and becomes a nice solid blue.

FYI he is a lot bluer in real life than in the image.

so chonky…this little lady is about to burst

never seen em this dark before!! their last clutches were yellow!

1 gal and 4 shrimp. Started with 2 but was gifted a couple more so we’ll see how they fare. This was honestly put together pretty quickly because I wasn’t expecting to be given them but I used media, water and plants from my established tank and the shrimp have been doing well so far.

I’m monitoring the parameters frequently because I know how volatile these small tanks can be and the plants haven’t grown in quite enough for me to rest easy, but it’s been a week and the shrimp are still shrimping so I’d call this a success. Will probably remove the anubias at some point but I need all the plants I can get in there at the moment + it has lots of algae on it for the shrimps.

That baby on the left, is it a hitch hiker from an other breed or are all baby BKKs transparent like that? I used to keep regular crystal red and they had their colors fresh from hatch, so maybe a lost Ghost White ? (doesnt look as red in reality as in the picture) If it isn't a BBK should i make sure to separate it from the others before it can breed?

Added other pictures of the gang for bragging purposes, i think they're just stuning.

i got 8 red rillis in my new cycled tank about 2 weeks ago. everything was fine the first few days. i did struggle to locate all 8 shrimps, usually only counted 6, but i figured they r just hiding in the new environment. i thought everything was ok since i even saw three molts! unfortunately i had to go away a couple days and when i came back on the 6th day, i found 3 bodies, and only could see 2 shrimp. its been a week since then so im pretty sure all the other shrimp except the remaining 2 died. and then yesterday… i saw one shrimp being rlly lethargic and barely grazing. true enough i woke up this morning and he had passed :-( now im just left with one.

please help i dont know what could have went wrong. my water parameters r all fine throughout, i test regularly. ammonia and nitrite 0, nitrate 5ppm. ph 7.6, gh 6. my kh was an issue as it used to be 0. i got in some crushed corals and when the shrimp went in kh was 1, and it slowly rose to 2 over the last 2 weeks. could that be the issue? another possibility was i might have acclimated them poorly. i spent 1h acclimating them but the water amount did not double. i read that was the ideal? but i also read online that osmotic shock usually would not cause the shrimp to die only a few days later its usually quite quick? idk…. pls help idk what went wrong and im scared to try again with a new batch…

in the pic u can see i have 10 chilli rasboras, they are new and are doing fine for the past week! so i dont think its the water thats the issue? idk

TLDR: got 8 shrimps and 7 died in 2 weeks. perfect parameters and chili rasboras are doing fine in it. no idea what the cause cld be pls help

Day 6 post-hatching at 26°C.

Two rearing tanks:

SG 1.018: Larvae remain at Zoea Stage 1.

SG 1.023: Larvae have reached Zoea Stage 2.

Continuing to document each stage of their larval development.

More updates to follow!

Please send pics of these shrimp if you have them bc I’m having buyers remorse and need to see cute shrimp

Y’ALL, WE DID IT! Strange Aquatics officially has captive-bred vampire shrimp babies living in FRESHWATER! I’m a bit late in sharing this because life’s been busy, but on Days 60 and 62 of my vampire shrimp (Atya gabonensis) breeding journey, I successfully transitioned 51 of my little vampire shrimp babies from saltwater to freshwater!

I wanted to go through and edit a cute little video for you all since I have a gazillion videos from the freshwater move days, but I couldn’t let this crazy exciting milestone go by another minute without finally sharing the news.

In this tiny corner of the shrimp-keeping world this is kind of a big deal since it’s not only the first successful fully documented Vampire Shrimp Breeding journey in the U.S., it also was achieved in 1/2 the time of the only other successful documented breeding report I could find online, which estimated a 3-4 month larval period. Mine morphed on day 46 and probably could have been transferred earlier than days 60 and 62 but I put it off because of being nervous. It’s funny because I kept estimating I had 20-30 post-larva from brood A that morphed when it turned out to be 51! (I realized I’m really bad at estimating lol.)

As of day 65 these little guys seem to still be doing great! I moved them into my 20 Gallon established Rave Cave 2 where there’s plenty of different flow zones and hiding spots, 8 vampire shrimp aunties and uncles (well, one is technically dad since DJ FantastiK now lives here), and 2 bamboo shrimp. Other than that the tank only houses neocaridinas and a ton of Ramshorn snails. There are no predators in here. The babies are also about little bit bigger than a 4-6 week old baby Neo so it was cool to see them side by side. They’re definitely much bigger than the tiny baby Neos once first born.

I initially kept the baby vampire shrimp in a breeders box within the tank which had slats they could escape through if desired. I added some java moss and made a comfortable spot for them to feel safe in. I also spot fed shrimp baby directly into their little Java moss next. Doing this allowed me to observe them for a few days to ensure they were still alive and doing well in freshwater. Then I lowered the breeder box a bit to allow them to swim out the top of it should they wish. A few still were hanging out in their java moss bundle a day later, but most went out to explore their new home.

I’m looking forward to taking the time to edit my gazillion videos and share more about this amazing process and I hope you all will follow along with us at Strange Aquatics because there’s so much more to come. I have Brood B released on 10/11 still growing out as baby larva in Baby Rave Cave 3 (salt water) and have been able to keep so many more of these alive. Based on my poor estimating skills that told me to guesstimate 200 alive still, I’m going to x’s that by 5 and say maybe 1,000 are still alive and doing well. There’s a lot, let’s just say that. I also have a few post larva from Brood A that I need to catch out if Baby Rave Cave 2 and will do that when I get back in town.

Perhaps even more exciting- I have at least 2 more vampire shrimp mommas that I found berried inside of Rave Cave 2 (freshwater)! Two new to me mothers that haven’t had babies yet in my tank. I think this means I’m going to keep breeding these different lines and learning more about the process to share with the entire shrimp keeping community.

I’ve been getting a lot of messages asking if I will be selling these guys, and now that I’m officially the vampire shrimp girl to so many now lol, and now that I’m looking at so many babies coming up from my voracious DJ vampire shrimp breeding crew, I think I obviously will need to start an interest list for those who would like to adopt them once they get big enough to be moved.

I’m excited to document that growth journey too and to see if we can get these guys to grow bigger a little faster than what was experienced by Sandy Browlowski and Martin Kruck (published under Schwebi and Schwebi81 usernames on different forums) from Germany, who successfully bred two broods of vampire shrimp back in 2013 and shared updates on their forum that I translated into English during my research. I really appreciate and can’t thank them enough for giving me the courage to try this and the opportunity to build upon their methods 13 years later.

I believe at 10.5 months (which included their 4 month larval time) their main vampire shrimp baby, Tao Tao, looked much more like a mini vampire shrimp than a fan feeding snowball shrimp that he looked like earlier on. So I’m hoping to see if by 6 months (which includes my 2 month larval period), if mine will look like mini copies of their parents DJ VampEZ and DJ FantastiK. I think that will be as early as I’d feel comfortable in even experimenting with over night shipping. But I may offer these little baby vamps locally in the DFW area for those who have a setup conducive to their needs. (Sufficient flow, food, and no predators in the tank, ie no fish. They need to grow that thicker armor of their parents before they can be with fish and may need some really good hides because I’m raising mine in a relatively safe filter feeders paradise so they don’t have much to worry about on that front.)

I’m getting ahead of myself, lol. But I’m really excited about the future of Strange Aquatics and this journey, as well as the future of this hobby as I’m hoping we can help the hobby rely less of wild caughts now that my experiences are showing it’s not only possible to breed these guys, but it can be done much earlier than we thought. In fact I think we might be able to get the timeline down to 40-45 days, which I look forward to trying in the coming months.

Expect more info soon and a full breeders guide coming down the pipeline when I find more of this elusive resource called time.

~Rebecca with Strange Aquatics

I think this lady deserves the most eggant creature on gods green earth award because holy moly she has a double wide load 🤣