prego cleaner

about once a month or so my cleaner makes some eggs and they sit in her for a while then one day she releases them. typically they are brown... this time they are metallic green!

she has been acting slightly sluggish the past two days, molted last night, and then i noticed the eggs around noon today. If they are a metallic color doesnt that mean they are fertilized?

 

so i checked some other sites... and when they are metallic then they are fertilized!

interestingly enough i dont have another cleaner shrimp! i do have a peppermint shrimp though... is it possible???

 

Hmmmm not sure if they would breed. But I cant think of any other way they could have gotten fertilized. Strange indeed.

 

I once had a lone cleaner shimp bear eggs and I was lucky enough to see hundreds of fry swimming about. With the water movement of the reef tank, not a single one made it, but plenty of fish ate well that night!

The shrimp was newly purchased, so I'm afraid I can't attribute the fertilization to assisted or non.

Either way, an egg bearing invert in your tank is a compliment on your water quality. Good luck to you.

 

Yes, that was my first thought. But then I read it had been in there and laid non-fertilized eggs before, so I don't know. I had an emerald spawn about a week after I got her. Same thing fish ate well.

 

Shrimp are hermaphrodites and will cycle between sexes at will. It is entirely possible for them to self-germinate, though it's not very common. I had a cleaner self germinate 2 years ago. One night about an hour after the light went out, I had several hundred tiny shrimp swimming around the tank. I saw them with a flashlight. None of them made it obviously, they became fish and anemone food and got filtered out. But it does happen, just nearly impossible to rear into juveniles unless you have a grow out tank ready.