Tag Archives: eggs

I was surprised when I looked into my tank and one of my bamboo shrimp had something in her abdomen. I was at first worried that there might be an infection but as I looked closer at the round orangey spheres and her pleopods caressing water over them I realized she had produced a batch of eggs. This caught me off guard because the colloquial knowledge is that these shrimp cannot be reproduced in a typical freshwater aquarium; their offspring go through a planktonic stage of life when first born and require brackish to full saltwater conditions to complete this phase into metamorphosis and grow into maturity, where then in the wild they would travel downstream to fresher waters. It seems however that they produce eggs just the same, and this is footage of what I believe is the final stages of this one laying hers. Sadly I don’t have a brackish or saltwater tank set up to attempt to raise the shrimplets, but perhaps in the future I will prepare something to attempt it.