Breeding
Breeding red cherry shrimp is as easy as putting an adult male and female together in an aquarium. You can observe the eggs developing in the female's ovaries as a green or yellow triangular "saddle" marking on her back. When she is ready to lay the eggs, which occurs after moulting, she releases pheromones into the water to signal her availability to males. The male shrimp in the tank will often become agitated, swimming very actively about as they search for the source of the pheromones. After a brief mating process, the female lays her eggs and affixes them to her swimmerettes.
They have 20–30 eggs, which take 2–3 weeks to hatch. The eggs are green or yellow, depending on the colour of the saddle. They turn darker and darker until the young shrimp hatch after about three weeks. As the eggs near the end stages of growth, tiny dark eye spots of the developing shrimplets within can be observed. When the young hatch, they are tiny (~1 mm) copies of the adults. They have no planktonic larval stage. They spend their first few days of life hiding among plants, where they are almost invisible, nibbling on the biofilm on the plants. They then emerge and graze on algae on tank surfaces and ornaments.
Read more about this topic: Cherry Shrimp
Famous quotes containing the word breeding:
“We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.”
—A.J. (Arnold Joseph)
“Good breeding ... differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Good breeding and good nature do incline us rather to help and raise people up to ourselves, than to mortify and depress them, and, in truth, our own private interest concurs in it, as it is making ourselves so many friends, instead of so many enemies.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)