Why cull shrimp?

[OverStocked]

Originally Posted by mach_six

Hobbyists may not but I am sure commercial and specialty breeders do kill them off.

Bulk breeders just sell the "culls" as what end up in fish stores, etc.

[chou]

Originally Posted by shinycard255

That's what I do with my culls

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk 2

Same here. My puffer is fat and happy.

[Merth]

Probably depends alot on the species breeding...guppies for instance are hard to rehome as fast as they breed but if you aren't up to killing sigh you end up with all your tanks full of them like mine.

[Soothing Shrimp]

Let's face it. Shrimp in general breed so fast and have so many offspring, and because we have taken away natural predators that keep their number down, WE are now the necessary evil that needs to keep numbers down in whatever way we decide to do it.

In the perfect conditions, a female shrimp can have 30 eggs fertilized (30 babies) every month. That's 360 yr.

No consider maybe half in a batch are female= 15 shrimp in one batch x 30 babies= 450 babies

Now after 3 months, each batch is mature= ####

### + ### + ### + ### etc

Okay, I'm too lazy to work out the math, but as you can see it is easily thousands of shrimp. Keep the best, cull the rest.

[Silmarwen]

I don't keep shrimp yet, but I've heard talk of using culls as fauna in nano tanks, plus I'd likely just feed them to larger fish if populations start getting out of control. Keep the super-pretty ones to look at, and return the rest to the natural circle of life. The additional benefit of culling your own shrimp to use as feeders is that you know the water they came from, and you can be sure that there will be no problems with disease.

[Soothing Shrimp]

And you know what they were fed and how they were kept. A HUGE plus for me!

[Silmarwen]

Exactly If I start breeding shrimp, honestly it will more be out of need for feeder shrimp than anything else, haha.

[Soothing Shrimp]

Absolutely nothing wrong with that! And if you find a nice color as well, you can incorporate a new aspect to your hobby.

[Knotyoureality]

I'm one of those using culls in my micro tanks (think 1g down to 1cup) and-- despite putting them in conditions that I wasn't sure they'd even survive in-- I'm now finding myself having to cull again: I've got berried females in two of my smaller vases and with so little volume I can't afford to add to the load.

While I understand the fascination with brightly colored shrimp, culls are sadly underestimated. For most of my tanks, amanos and ghosts can get too big and too obnoxious, and high grade dwarfs would *detract* from the natural layout. Tiny dwarf culls--brown or greenish, lightly spotted, transparent or nearly so---are perfect. I can have a whole swarm of 'em tucked unobtrusively away in the underbrush picking away at algae and debris, merrily doing their jobs and providing the occasional live treat for my larger fish. It's fun seeing what variants are thrown as well--pretty amazing what can happen when you just let 'em go wild.

[Silmarwen]

Originally Posted by Knotyoureality

pretty amazing what can happen when you just let 'em go wild.

I love this philosophy, haha. It's so true, though.