Skunk Cleaner
 

Slight dilemma. My skunk cleaner has appeared to have mated with my peppermint shrimp. I would like to make a viable attempt at raising the young so I'm going to do a little experiment. SO I need a little bit of feed back. What kind of food would you guys recommend feeding and at which stages? Im thinking phyto for the first couple days.

did you manage to get them out of the tank? they are extremely fragile and even picking them up with a net will break their spine...if any go through violent flow their spine will break. they will gather at the water surface and near a light so best way to remove them is to cut off the pumps and have no more flow as soon as they are released and then put a point light at the surface and they will gather there and then remove them with a container rather than a net.

for the feeding, they eat freshly hatched baby brine shrimp enriched with selcon and live rotifers. This is a major challenge you are attempting because any pump will break and kill them, so how are you planning to create a current and oxygenate the wate? Best way would be to have a hatchery inside the aquarium so that the fish cannot get to them and they will be stuck inside but the water quality will be the same as the aquarium.

good luck :) mine did not last an hour before they got either eaten by coral or killed by the pumps. They release them at night.

This thread might help you to see a proper container for them:

http://www.thereeftank.com/forums/f6...al-165108.html

Sounds like good advice, but for the important part... what would you call the babies? Peppermint-Skunks? Minty Cleans? Would they eat aiptasia and clean ich? you could have created a super shrimp!

pepperskunk shrimp :)

I seriously doubt that they will reach maturity though..it's really hard to rear the tiny larvaes.

They are so fragile and easily killed that I find it a sheer miracle that they survive in the open ocean!

check this link out:

http://breedersregistry.org/Reprints...umr/shrimp.htm

Save yourself the expense, hassle, stress, and frustration and call them free fish food.

well, if someone is willing to try it and have the spare time? why not? :)

When I learned how hard it was I did not want to get into hatching brine etc...because I was working but have I had the time I would have tried it. One must be ready when they hatch though and I was not ready and I did not have any container ready for them and no food.

I suppose, but if my kids wanted to know how to parachute off the roof of the house I guess I could advise them how to, But I would just rather advise them not to ....Sometimes you just need to steer people away from ideas that in the end will likely only frustrate them.

someone once said this for all marine life in a glass box;)

Good point..lol