Friday, 30 November 2007

Shrimp

Last week, I lost three of my cherry red shrimp, perhaps as a consequence of a large swing in temperature. I still have one of the original adults (a male, presumably) and at least a dozen juveniles (the largest of which are almost the size of the male).

Over the last few days I have been seeing some tiny organisms swimming around in the tank. Initially they were just at the limits of my perception, but by today they approaching a half a millimetre. Are they some sort of small crustaceans which were introduced with the plants but are finally reaching population sizes that allow them to be noticed, or are the baby shrimp? It's possible that one of the females was carrying eggs that hatched before she died - but I'm surprised that I would have missed something like that. Of course, it's also possible that one of them was carrying eggs when she died - and that some of those eggs managed to survive untended.

I suppose I shall find out eventually whether these are shrimp or something else. Shrimp would be cool. A spontaneous Daphnia population would also be kinda cool.

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