Anyone every tried these feeder shrimp?

[SLPReefer]

http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/prod_Display.cfm?pCatId=2191

I wonder how hard they are to keep and breed.....

[lottie_pufferfish]

iwonder to, it says there good food so id asume there a little easy. are they related to ghost shrimp?

[sea monkey]

looks like something that will hide all day : )

edit , ya going to try and raise them as food for something ?

[BiochemRobyn]

Jeff-
Forget those. What you really need are the common shore shrimp (Palaemonetes vulgaris). They are TONS cheaper and they come with aquaculturing directions (http://www.aquaculturestore.com/info/css.html). You can purchase them in freshwater or saltwater, but what you want is the saltwater type. I bought some over a month ago, and I still see them come out at night to feed. Two of the best places to purchase them are:

http://www.aquaculturestore.com/swinverts.html : $24.95 for 50 with free shipping.

http://www.livebrineshrimp.com/ : $20.00 for 100, but you have to pay for shipping. See my other post about ordering from here if you want to order any soon.

[BiochemRobyn]

Oh- I forgot to mention, ask wildflower for more information. She was the one that told me about them :biggrin:

[capman]

I am not an expert on the various species in the genus Penaeus (the genus of the shrimp being sold by Drs. Foster and Smith), but shrimp in this genus (and in this family in general, I think) are the shrimp that people commonly eat. There are a number of different species that are caught in the wild or cultured for human consumption. It looks to me like the white shrimp being sold here are probably small ones from aquaculture, that would normally be raised up for people to eat. I don't know how large this particular species gets, but my guess would be that if you think about how big shrimp in the grocery store are, that would probably give you a pretty good idea of how big they will get.

I have kept very similar species (pink shrimp and white shrimp from northern Florida in the Gulf of Mexico) in aquaria. They are very cool animals (of course, what shrimp is not?). The ones I have kept, and likely also the ones being sold by Drs. Foster and Smith, like to burrow into fine sand and sit there completely concealed except for their long-stalked eyes by day, and they are out and about at night (some species I gather are more diurnal than others). Their eyes, by the way, have a beautiful iridescent orange eyeshine if you shine a flashlight on them at night in the dark.

They really are beautiful animals. Not flame angelfish sort of beauty, but they have a sort of graceful, intricate beauty, especially when swimming forward using their swimmerets (the multiple paired flap-like apprendages on the bottom of the tail). When startled they flip their tails forward for very rapid backwards getaways...you need to keep their tank well covered or else you might have them flipping out onto the floor accidentally if they get startled (large ones are particularly impressive in their ability to flip out of tanks accidentally) - these animals have very large muscular tails that are much larger in proportion to their bodies than the tails of peppermint or cleaner shrimp, and these powerful muscles are what allow them to get away so fast. I find it sort of ironic that these tails that serve them so well in getting away from predators in a hurry are the very reason why they are so sought after by humans who want to eat them!

My sense of these animals is that they are really not reef creatures, and I think a reef tank with lots of rocks and such would not be the ideal home for them. I think an ideal tank for them would have a big flat bottom covered with fine sand and not a lot of obstructions. In the wild, I think they are creatures of open bottoms with fine sediments, seagrass beds, etc (I have seen them in such places anyway).

If your goal is to get these to raise them and have them reproduce for feeding other animals, I suspect they might not be the best choice. I would guess that they would need to get fairly large before they would breed. The other shrimp mentioned by others here might be better choices, though I don't know what is involved in raising up their larvae, which would likely be the hardest part. If someone did wish to breed Panaeus shrimp though, I'm sure there is a lot of information available in the aquaculture literature, since these are raised on a large scale in some coastal regions.