Invertebrate Info

This really nice guy asked me what he missed at the meeting last night.  So here goes...

Young skinny guy looked about 23 years old.  Grad student thrilled to have a free flight and food.  He said that, I'm not making it up.  He talked about peppermint shrimp, harlequin shrimp, cleaner shrimp, and mentioned fire shrimp, pistol shrimp, and the different species within their genus.  At this point in time, I got to thinking of Bubba from Forrest Gump.  "I like to raise cleaner shrimp, peppermint shrimp, fire shrimp...."  

Genus, he says.  I had to think back to Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species - - the order of classes - - goes back to Darwin days.  See?  I learned something when I was a sophomore in H.S.  Anyway, he loves peppermint shrimp.  I think he would like to raise them commercially, or at least get a big old grant to keep doing this work that he loves.  So he told us about challenges to raising shrimp.

1) It's hard to tell which true breed of shrimp you've got.  It seemed like the prettiest peppermint shrimp come from Haiti.  Most of the ones we would get look very similar, but come from Florida (esp. if bought in the spring or fall).

2) They're hermaphrodites.  I think there were 3 different types of hermaphroditism.  One type is where they are male and female at the same time.  Another is initially male, changing to female as necessary (or the alternate). 

3) Shrimp have to molt in order to grow through their larval stages.  Various problems inhibit them from growing.  Suzy could really relate to the problem of needing lots of tiny food, plus really good water parameters.

4) Disease is bad, but a shrimps' brothers and sisters are just as dangerous if not more so.  Canibalism!  Now I don't feel so bad about feeding shrimp to my shrimp.

5) Of the 5 kinds of peppermints, some of them move through to adulthood more quickly.  I got lost in a quick hurry on that one.  I couldn't translate the latin names into "reality."  Maybe Adam can clarify.  Of course, it sounded like the prettiest take a while to mature.  Like 145+ days.

6) When raising shrimp for commercial sale (like 20,000+ per MONTH) it sounds like it's only worthwhile if you produce a shrimp that is worth charging enough to raise it.  In other words, don't spend $12 to raise a shrimp that retails for $2 because it's readily available from a third world country that gets 10 cents a shrimp for catching them.   So you would need to raise something not readily available, or find a way to raise them very cheaply.

7) Shrimp like a varied diet.  Sounds like they get bored.  Oh, and they spin their food around quite a few times before they chomp.  I think they don't see very good, so they're checking to make sure that it's really food.

Hmm... I learned that Emerald crabs can be green or red.  I think they're the "both male & female" hermaphrodites.  That seems like it would hurt.  Or at least make you a cranky crab.  He also said that they (who's they?) have found that crabs and shrimp help promote the growth of corals, apparently something to do with removing some type of mucus from the edges of the coral.

Hopefully you guys can chime in and mention anything I forgot.  I really wanted to hear about amphopods, copepods, ghost shrimp, and mysis shrimp.  But I guess most of the above info would apply to them.  Come to think of it, he said he has info prepared about them, too.  Is there any way that he might let us see his .ppt presentation?