Yellow Opae & breeding update

[Corucia]

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 Opae mated with the same recessive trait).

Sure enough, one of the females subsequently berried and I now have at least five Opae larvae hovering in the tank. While they are still very small, they all appear to be a pale yellow so I’m hopeful that they will mature into adult yellow Opae like their parents.

One interesting characteristic of these Opae is that they appear to be predominantly nocturnal. During the daylight hours I rarely see more than one or two of them out and about in the tank, with the remainder hiding in the crevasses of the rocks. In the late evening and night they tend to all come out and swarm around much in the same way the red Opae are typically active during the day.

Initially I thought their daytime hiding was from the stress of catching and moving them from their original tank (Mustafa has the same take). However, as this trait has persisted consistently for four months, I’m pretty sure it’s a genetic characteristic of this particular sub-strain of Opae. Note, it originally took me the better part of a week to find and catch all of them as they were seldom in sight. So this nocturnal behavior was probably evident in their original tank albeit not as obvious with the other 100+ red Opae highly active. Regardless, I’ll be sure to post more pics as the larvae mature and transition to the next phase.

And last but not least, I’ve been able to get a few sprigs of Batophora occidentalis to germinate in the new yellow Opae tank after failing to get it to grow in my other tanks (other than the one large tank where it had originally grown well on and off for the past several years).