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Horny snails but the shrimp aint going for it..

1333 Views 13 Replies 5 Participants Last post by  Eden Marel, 
Dave-H
Not horned snails, horny nerite snails. It's crazy, they are laying eggs everywhere and if it means anything, I see one snail on top of another like 4 times a day! Jeez!

But my yellow shrimp (cherry red shrimp, but the yellow ones) have no babies so far! I learned what the concepts of 'saddled' and 'berried' were and I've been watching closely.

There are about 12 shrimp in the tank. They appear to be healthy. About one week ago I changed the water and the next morning I saw what appeared to be dead shrimp on the substrate. It turned out, these were the leftover skeletons from shrimp that had molted, which made me happy cause it suggest the tank is reasonably healthy. Actually, one shrimp died one my but hopefully that was an exception.

Then I started to notice that the yellow color was really showing nicely! It became obvious that at least 4 or maybe 5 of the bigger ones were female and were 'saddled'. The unsaddled ones were a bit smaller and less yellow, so they are probably males (right?).

I keep lookin for those berries, but nothing yet! How long should it take from when they are fully saddled to when they start carrying the eggs around?

Also, when they become berried, the eggs travel from the saddle area, which I think is the ovary, and emerge down below. So, if a shrimp is still saddled that means that they could become berried any time?

Are the girls waiting for the guys to come and get busy? Should I break out the Marvin Gaye? With all the snail sex going on in the tank I figured it would get them in the mood, although it's not doing much for me!
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mordalphus
Here's the thing... Once you receive the shrimp in the mail, you have between 2-4 weeks (usually about 4) before they'll start doing the nasty... They have to learn to appreciate their new water parameters. This is true for any shrimp (but with sensitive shrimp it requires YOU changing the parameters for THEM), and so just remember it takes TIME most of all.

Once you see saddles, there's no guarantee there will be berries soon, but in most cases, the berries are just a molt away.

And with nerites, that's just what they DO, they're always laying eggs everywhere, and it's entirely annoying and unnecessary.

I'd say give them a bit more time before trying to force a molt or anything, because chances are if you force a molt before 4 weeks of them in your water, they'll just berry and drop the eggs, or they will not berry at all.
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Dave-H
Ok, so it sounds like things are moving along nicely in the tank! I am excited for them to breed. I just saw my first baby MTS and that was nice to see, too.

As for the nerites, I'm not sure what to do. If they are going to polka dot the entire tank I want to get rid of them now. If the eggs would dissolve in, say, a few months, and it the eggs would never accumulate too much it would be ok. But jeez. The eggs look just like they did when I first started seeing them 6 weeks ago!
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mordalphus
They do dissolve in a few months, or at least they get easy to remove with a mag float
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Dave-H
For some reason they stopped laying eggs on the glass, now it's ALL on my driftwood!
Are you saying that if I were to wait, say, 6 months they would disappear, or 'mostly' disappear? That might be ok, as long as I know that I won't eventually end up with a tank that looks like a bunch of white dots!
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Eden Marel
I'm pretty sure there was a nerite egg picking stick tool!! I'm sure I saw it online somewhere.
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mordalphus
Fresh ones are hard to get off, even with an algae scraper, lol.

But yeah, they disappear after about 2 months, but the nerites will always lay more eggs.... When you find one laying eggs, separate her so you have a tank of males, and a tank of females.
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H
If your female shrimps are saddled at the moment, you will need to stimulate another molting for them to get berried.

They will molt with water change, if you are worry, just do a 20% changed.
Make sure your water is dechlorinated.(safer way is to left it a couple of days after dechlorination.)

You know a female is ready to get berried when you see all your males getting fanatic and swimming around looking for something.
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R
Those nerite eggs will stick around much longer than 2 months. I had some eggs that were there even after half a year. Very ugly looking. Scrape them all off and if you can determin which one is laying the eggs, get rid of it. I only have two nerites left and I no longer get eggs. I think they must be males.
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Dave-H
Well, I have 5 nerites. So, I think I will try to remove them one by one until the egg laying stops. I am gonna try to remove one sex only but it looks pretty hard to sex them. Check out this forum post about it!
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mordalphus
Gotta catch them laying eggs man!
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Dave-H
Are you serious? What am I looking for? I have seem them doing some kind of crazy snail copulating and it ain't pretty, but I've never seen an egg layed!
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mordalphus
they will be right where there are a bunch of new eggs, they do it really slowly. i used to catch my olives doing it all the time
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Eden Marel
I think I have all males. I had three of them but no eggs. I just put my Tracked with my Zebra.
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