# [Wet Thumb Forum]-Wild-caught freshwater shrimp!



## Paulo Pinheiro (Feb 11, 2003)

Hi all!

It's been a long, long time since I've been here, mainly because I was away to do part of my PhD work in a foreign country, which meant tearing down the aquarium...

I've now set it up and running again but few plants in it still...

Yesterday while walking arround river Mondego, in Portugal I noticed a kind of flees that jumped up by the duzens whenever rocks in shallow water were disturbed. These turned out to be little shrimp, about 1 cm long that were caught easily and in large numbers with a soda bottle! Having searched the net I found them to be Atyaephyra desmarestii, a freshwater species that very actively feeds on organic debris. After a few days of quarentine, I'll put a few in my 65 Gal tank to see how they do. They are supposed to grow up to 3 cm and stand temps of 4-28ºC. Maybe they are a good and atractive alternative way to clean the bottom of aquariums!

You can find pics here

http://guillaume.doucet.free.fr/detail_taxon.php?id_table=crustaces&id_taxon=4

and here

http://www.wirbellose.de/arten.cgi?action=show&artNo=010

and info (only in French, sorry...) here

http://www.aquabase.org/crustacea/view.php3?id=27


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## imported_russell (Sep 14, 2004)

that is very neat. you will have to tell us how it turns out.


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## Paulo Pinheiro (Feb 11, 2003)

Well, so far the experience has been both positive and negative. Negative only in the sense that my barbs eat all the shrimp I put in the first time... They are only one cm or less, so the barbs, although still small, really filled their tummies with them









The second time I put in a few duzens and this time many seem to have escaped long enough to find hiding places (anyway, it was impossible for the two barbs to eat them all!).

The good news is that by the next morning these busy little bees had cleaned every trace of algae from the wood and glass!!! I strongly recommend these to do the maitenance on the tank, especially if you do not have barbarian fish that eat anything that moves... After a couple of days I think they did munch a bit on the tender leaves of my egeria densa, but they seem to prefer scraping food from stuf like wood and stones and even the corners of the tank. Maybe it was also because there must still be many in the tank and leftovers are probably not enough for all... I hope they grow fast so that the barbs can't eat them anymore, otherwise I'll just have to make another nice bike trip to the river and catch some more and get rid of the barbs that have always p****d me off.

I'll keep you guys informed about the development of this experiment.


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## imported_russell (Sep 14, 2004)

hehe, i think it's a great experiment, and if they clean as well as you say they do, they could be very useful. good luck!


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