Will hungry Yamato shrimps eat fish?

[|squee|]

Is there such a thing? My Yamatos are rather hungry for food due to lack of algae in my tank and they look more than capable of getting one of my Ember Tetras.

[Quixotic]

Well, there have been comments from hobbyists that they do eat fish. I am not sure what to make of these as I am not totally convinced.

Personally, I would really like to see the actual predation taking place (photo or video). Note the key word, "actual predation" and not, "in the midst of eating it". The fish may be already dead when the shrimp was eating it.

My opinion is that, they will only eat sick or dying fish and somehow, they can sense which ones are these. It can be easy to grab sick or dying fish due to their slowness to react. If your fish are healthy, then I don't think there is any need to be alarmed.

Feed the shrimps if you are worried, and the possibilities would greatly diminish. You are supposed to feed them anyway, being the responsible aquarist that you are, right?

[carlfsk]

I have personally eye witness the yamato clamping the fins of my catfish fry of about 1cm length.

I had wanted to save the fry, but the yamato just grabbed it and hide away.

Have since removed all the yamato. Somtimes they can really do harm.

[Quixotic]

The problem with fries is that they are somewhat sensitive to water parameters, so they can be susceptible to health issues. Some fries will inevitably grow weak (and eventually die).

This in turn ties in with the suspicion that Yamatos will take advantage of weak fish. Also, can we actually rule out that the "victimised" fries are not weak in the first place? I doubt this can be done with absolute certainty.

The other questions is that why is there a lack of literature that mentions this? If Yamatos are that capable of eating fish, then wouldn't the literatures warn about this. Yet, there is no mention of this at all. Furthermore, there have been many many aquarists around the world who managed to keep them without such issues in community tanks.

However, I am not going to rule this out with absolute certainty, but based on educated conjectures, these seem to be exceptions rather than the norm. Therefore, it would be *reasonable* to believe that this shouldn't be an issue. (If I am wrong, then I stand to be corrected.)

[|squee|]

Thanks for the information.

I've decided to let it be... after all if I were to take out the Yamatos I've no place to put them and to take them out will mean thrashing a good 1 year-old tank.

[meerkat]

My case is that I ever saw a Yamato chewing a Cherry but no hard evidence that the latter was attacked or was already dead when the Yamato made a meal out of it.

I speculated then that the Cherry might be molting and with it's soft body might look to be a tempting target for any predator, vertebrate or not. Again I have no proof of such a theory because I have not seen any attacks on molting shrimps.

The only time I witnessed a full attack was when a large ghost shrimp grabbed hold of a small neon tetra and immediately devouring it. After this incident, I removed all large ghost shrimps and banished all of them in a small plastic container.

[Quixotic]

Ghost shrimps, which belong to the Macrobrachium genus, are different shrimps from Caridina multidentata (Amano). They are opportunistic scavengers, using their large pair of pincers to grab anything considered as food (including unfortunate small fishes).

[meerkat]

I guess if one has larger fishes and can only afford inexpensive types like the feeder ghost shrimps instead of pricier species like Amanos or Oto cats, one can go ahead.

Must say the ghost shrimps are pretty prolific and rather efficient in cleaning up leftover food. Not sure about their ability to whack algae though...