My Adult Brine Shrimp Acting Peculiar.....

[Ludwig Venter]

By accident, I managed to raise some Brine shrimp to about (just over) 1cm, which I believe is their adult size....

Tonight, I notice that several pairs are swimming around "piggy backing" with the top one being all white, whilst the one at the bottom has a full length reddish spinal streak from the head to the tip of the tail...... (so I assume these to be males and females (with eggs).....

Do shrimp have this sort of mating ritual??.... there are many tiny newly hatched shrimp also swimming in the container.

 

[Caprichoso]

By accident, I managed to raise some Brine shrimp to about (just over) 1cm, which I believe is their adult size....

Tonight, I notice that several pairs are swimming around "piggy backing" with the top one being all white, whilst the one at the bottom has a full length reddish spinal streak from the head to the tip of the tail...... (so I assume these to be males and females (with eggs).....

Do shrimp have this sort of mating ritual??.... there are many tiny newly hatched shrimp also swimming in the container.

I have seen these behaviours from my neocaridina heterooda several times. It's not the actual mating. With mating, the male will be underneath the female and it happens very fast. The piggy back is a couple of things. If the bottom shrimp has a piece of food that the other one wants, it will do that and also, when a female wants to mate she will release a hormone that make the males swim around like crazy trying to find the female so they jump on the backs of everyone(male and female) to find the female that released the hormone. They will ride around on a shrimp for a long time and I've seen 4 shrimp stacked on top of each other all at once! Crazy little creatures

 

[Ludwig Venter]

Some updated pics taken tonight....

 

[Ludwig Venter]

This should probably be in Marine invertabrates section, but w.t.h.... we all breed brine shrimp....

The eggs above the water level are probably newly laid..... I scoop them off and dry them dayly:

Here they are just swimming around (and some piggybacking - if you look closely)