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my setup for breeding mysid shrimp

gpx1200

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i'm planing on raising some cuttle hatchlings so i'm going to start a mysid culture to hopefuly breed all the mysids i need to feed the babbies.
useing info i got here The Breeder’s Net: Culture Of Mysid Shrimp And Bivalve Trochphores (veligers) i have made an acrylic devider/babbie seperator to install inside a 40g breeder tank, it uses 2 lift tubes from an under gravel filter wich are coverd on the end with 1000 micron screen to keep out the adult mysids and gently suck up the babbies and deposit them on the other side of the devider, the other half of the devider is 475 micron screen that should keep the babbie mysids in and alow the brine shrimp nauplii (food) to circulate through the tank.
i will use live sand and some liverock taken from my reeftanks to aid in filtration along with a small internal hang on filter with the intake screened off with the 475 micron screen, i'd like to plumb the mysid tank right into the sump with one of my reef tanks but i'm not shure if the reef peramiters would be ideal for raising mysids
i'm thinking of deviding the tank 3/4 for the adults and 1/4 for the babbies and posibly suspending a peice of eggcrate or drilled acrylic on some pvc legs in the adult side to create a kind of second floor to create more surface area.
any advice,opinions,?
i could realy use some input on ideal peramiters for the mysids, would they do well with reef peramiters or should i keep the system seperate?
 

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woohoo!!

finaly got a mysid culture today to start breeding, i got about 50 from a local guy who is breeding them for his seahorses, i put them in a 20 long with some sand and rock rubble from my well established reef tanks, ill be puting a stand togeather in the next few days for the 40 breeder then i can finaly see how the babby seperator i made works
 
Definitely record how well this works as there are a lot of cuttle keepers that would love to have the ability to minimize mysid expenses!
 
DWhatley;197096 said:
Definitely record how well this works as there are a lot of cuttle keepers that would love to have the ability to minimize mysid expenses!

Might i suggest using something akin to rubbermaid tubs & chaeto? You can create a fairly simple recirculating system and provide all the live food necessary for any number of babies.

http://www.jdskiles.com/stocktanks.html has round stock tanks up to 950 gallons(could daisy chain them in a DIY RAS), the primary benefit of a circular breeder is that there are no corners with which the mysis may be caught and thus cannibalized; one could also co-culture copepods to feed the mysis coupled with fish waste from the DT which will continue to sustain burgeoning densities. Chaeto and other fuge-tough macros also help with filtration and hiding places for the various fauna. Nannochloropsis oculata reactors (Grotek or Aquamedic i believe) might also be a worthy investment in the way of viability long term, but mysis are omnivores, and, well fed, are less susceptible to cannibalism, for those more difficult to raise species this system could be used solely with calanoid copepods and while, typically, even the most difficult fish will eat small copepods, if they cannot then their offspring are of extreme use and appropriate size.

Regards,
-The Don
 
well so far so good, i don't have the 40 breeder up and runing yet but i can spot a few tiny babbies in the 20 long that i belive wer born their, the tank is loaded with coapapods and i feed 1-2 times a day with newly hatched brine shrinp, hopefuly my new seives and a bottle of decaped brine shrinp eggs will show up tomorow to make feeding a little easier along with another 200 mysids for breeding stock
 
well i finaly got my 40 breeder with the babbie seperator up and runing yesterday and i think with a little more tweaking it will be a sucsess. after about a full day runing i can see 10-15 very tiny misids in the nursery side of the tank but i also have some small adults making their way in threw a few small gaps i found in the corners of the devider screen and around the edges of the holes i cut for the lift tubes, hopefuly after i cover these holes i will only see babbies in the nursery side if the adults are still geting threw then i need to find some screen a little smaller than the 1000 micron stuff i'm useing now on the ends of the lift tubes.
somthing else i noticed colecting in the nursery side of the tank are somthing i found out to be called jellyfish hydroids,another unwanted byproduct of ordering my mysids from anf, i don't know if their eating the mysids but i know their eating the babby bride from the big orange bellies they get after i feed. i'm going to try and siphon out as many as i can so they don't take over, they seem to grow very fast.
i saved the other 30 or so shrimp from the order that wern't mysids and i'm going to put them in a 10g tank to see what they grow into or if theyll breed
 

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The hydroids may also be from the brine. This is always a problem with raising dwarf seahorses and is usually attributed to using undecapped (I know you ordered decapped). I would expect them to be a problem for the mysis since they are known to kill the small horses. You might look up hydroids and dwarf seahorses for some suggestions as it has been years since I have kept any.
 
i know the hydroids can come from dirty brine but i never saw any with the first 50 mysids that i got localy, they all showed up with the order from anf, the sad part is they advertise their mysids as an exselent food for seahorses.
on the bright side the hydroids are all colecting on the 475micron screen in the nursery side either becouse they like it their or thier being forced their by the current but it will make them eiser to remove anyway.

now that i have blocked off the extra openings by superglueing small bits of acrylic over them i am only seeing the very tiny babbie mysids in the nursery side so far but ill have to wait till tomorow to be shure becouse most of the adults seem to make their way over at night, they are hard to find but if i turn off the air for a minuet then turn it back on full blast the current catches the babbies by suprise and sweeps them up into the water colum wear they are easy to see.
after seeing how the babbies cling to the bottom i think i would get a better colection rate by locating the openings of the lift tubes closer to the bottom of the tank, right now the 2 tubes are about 1 and 2 inches off the bottom, i think i'm going to extend one all the way down so it's touching the bottom and leave the other about 1/2inch off the bottom, i'm also going to get some 800 micron screen from sachs and make another set of tubes to see if the smaller openings help keep the adults out.
 
well ive coverd every posible gap i can find and this morning i have a bunch of small adult mysids in the nursery so they must be coming threw the 1000 micron screen so i'm going to order some smaller mesh screen tomorow and probably a few hundreed more mysids to up my breeding stock.
 
lighting upgrade

i had some extra led components around so i decided to rig up a quick light bar for the mysid tank, this one should help keep the cheato alive, it was dieing off under the 18w florecent bulb i had on the tank. this bar only draws about 9-10w and it definetly makes spoting the babbies easyer. from gatering up parts to adjusting the fishing line hanger this one took me about 45min to build(the metal was allready cut and drilld)

as for the function of the breeder tank i have found that if i turn down the air on the lift tubes i get very few adults in the nursery side, i think the high flow is what was making it posible for them to squeez threw the 1000 micron mesh or mabie all the small adults i had in that size range outgrew the holes and can't fit any more. either way i am seeing more and more babbies in the nursery side along with only a few small adults that i pick out dayly i can also see noticable growth in some of the babbies so i am asuming that the newborns are surviving and will hopefuly grow to adulthood.
i am going to restart the 20l for another mysid tank in wich i will only place a few pregnant females to give birth then be removed so i can try and raise a batch of babbies without anything much larger to pray on them.
i have read how sometimes peppermint shrimp will follow a pregnant female around waiting for her to give birth so they can grab an easy meal and i'm thinking in a large group of mysids alot of babbies may be eaten quickly before they can get threw the screen of the babbie seperator hence my idea for the birthing tank.
 

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Do you have any kind of feel for how many size separations you will need to keep predation minimized? It occurs to me that only two size divisions are not enough and that the babies that doe grow will start consuming the next generation. I am surprised the peps have not consumed all your adults.
 
i didn't mean that pepermints will follow mysisds around they follow other pregnant pepermints around, i was just compairing them to mysids and considering the posability that the mysids could do the same and be feeding on babbie mysids as they are born. i don't have pepermints in with my mysids but i'm thinking of adding a few turbo snails to help keep the screens clean of algie.
and yes i have considerd adding a third compartment with 800 mesh screen on the lift tube but for now i'm going to try seperating the pregnant females into the 20 long and moving some of the males into other tanks, posibly some females as well they are pretymuch bottom dwellers so i don't think theyll wind up in the overflow and spiders tank and my mangrove tank have tons of coepaods and no preditors for them to wory about so mabie theyll start colonies their as well
 
Ah, that makes more sense :biggrin2:

I have found that Astrea snails are the best algae cleaners I have ever had and recommend trying them along with the turbos to see which species works best for attacking the mesh blockage.

I am really enjoying your experiment. Thinking about how to somewhat automate the system, I wonder if a middle chamber that has lift tubes emptying into the larger mysis side (ie if the screens get smaller from left to right, the tubes would dump right to left) would result in everything getting eaten or if it would allow healthy numbers of three sizes to continually be separated.
 
i'm not seeing alot of progress in raising my numbers so far i'm geting babbies in the nursery side wich are growing but i'm also loosing adults any time the food gets low it seems my numbers go down, i'm going to continue trying to seperate and raise the babbies and i'm seting up another 20g tank to house mysids but i have also orderd some cuttlefish eggs so when the eggs hatch ill start picking out some of the males to feed and try and keep the females(easly identified by the white brood pouch) in the breeder tank. i figure if theyr going to eat each other any way i might as well be feeding cuttle fish and ill try and grow out whatever babbies i can save.
i have noticed that in a tank with alot of open area the mysids seem to groop togeather near one or two corners but after i added some rocks and cheato to break up the space the mysids spread out more wich i think might help cut down on canibalisum
 
Even light distribution may help scatter them as well but I suspect the cheato may provide the most protection and you might consider experimenting with distributing it across the entire top surface of the adult tank (I hate the stuff when it starts to break apart :hmm:)
 

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