Petshrimp.com Discussion Forum

I thought I’d share with the group my recent experience with Metabetaeus Lohena. My experience with Lohena date back quite some time, when I introduced a pair into my first Opae tank about 15 years ago.

Frankly, it was a somewhat disappointing experiment as I almost never saw either of the Lohena ...

Some more (hopefully) yellow Opae babies and one of the moms / dads

Funny you should ask Mozzie as I was going to post an update this weekend on the latest developments. In the tank that I got the Batophora to grow in, it thrived for over three years. Then out of the blue it went through a death spiral, where essentially 95% of it died over the course of 6 months ...

It’s weird as I’ve picked up numerous mossballs from here and introduced them in several of my tanks but none of them have ultimately survived let alone multiplied (they’ve all shrunken over time and likely consumed by the shrimp as they’ve wilted). Conversely, the microalgae has thrived and there ...

It’s been about four months since I isolated roughly a dozen yellow Opae Ula shrimp that I found in one of my mature tanks and moved them to a dedicated new tank to see if they would reproduce yellow offspring (they were presumably the result of some recessive gene that had expressed itself when two ...

Thanks John. They are doing well and it’s interesting to see that they are generally more shy / less active than their red counterparts. For almost a week they seemingly all hid and I feared that something had happened with the water chemistry and they all died in the rocks. But over the past week ...

Hi John and thanks for the note. I feed them almost nothing. Around once a month I sprinkle in a pinch of food. The amphipods seem to have established a stable and relatively small population in this tank. I have another much larger Opae lab reactor (around 8 gallons) that has had a thriving ...

Following up on my earlier post regarding my yellow Opae sub-population, I decided to set up a dedicated tank to isolate the yellow variants and see if they might establish a breeding colony. After close examination, I was surprised to find over a dozen mostly or entirely yellow examples in one of ...

Hi Mustafa. It just appeared on one of the rocks some time ago spontaneously and has subsequently spread to all of the dragon stone. The Opae also very actively graze on it (pics attached).

It’s my pleasure. FYI, he periodically sheds his skin and just went through another molt cycle the other day. Here is his shed, which looks amazingly intact (I always get scared when I see these sheds sitting on the bottom of the tank as I fear he’s died).

Ah, I’ve decided to establish a stand alone breeding take for them John. It’s just cycling now and should be good to go in about three weeks. Will post some pics when I introduce the yellow shrimp into the new environment. Here it is cycling. Stay tuned!

Hey John. I picked them up from Aquarium depot (see https://aquariumdepot.com/amphipods-copepods-1000-gammarus-sp/?searchid=416494&search_query=Amphipods). It was an assortment of amphipods and copepods. While not specifically oriented towards brackish water, I’ve found a substantial portion of the ...

I wanted to share some pics of an unusual form of algae that has spread across the dragon stone in one of my mature tanks. Interestingly it’s only established itself on the dragon stone but is absent on other surfaces (eg, the substrate, shells, sea fans, etc). Curious if anyone knows what species ...

I wanted to share the smallest Opae tank that I’ve set up, which uses a diminutive lab reactor (5000ml / ~1.3 gallon). It’s been running for about three years and I originally established the ecosystem using water, algae, snails, amphipods, copepods and larval-stage Opae Ula from my other tanks, so ...

Thanks for the kind words Aquarimax 🙏. The Opae did come from Mustafa’s stock albeit they have been breeding across my tanks for over a decade so they have many generations of offspring. This tank was initially seeded from two different tanks where I took both adult and juvenile examples (and one ...