cheapest hardworking shrimp

[limyw]

bought 50 malayans from seaview last weekend. but after 7 days, more than 70% died off while my cherry reds are still OK. strange also, that the larger malayans were preying and eating the smaller cherry reds (saw it with my own eyes). also, the dead malayans were untouched by their fellow scavangers and bodies left to rot in the tank. ca any bro care to help me understand why? should I not keep malayans with cherry reds? why are the malayans or cherry reds not clearing off the dead malayans?

[Jeremy747]

Hard to understand the situation, but my experience with shrimps is that they don't do well to sudden changes.

My cherry reds can be pushed to live in rather dirty conditions before a few of them start to go belly over. But if I were to put a new batch of shrimps into water that is not half as dirty, they all die straight away. I think that's the case with your Malaysian shrimp.

I had a few of those living together with my cherry shrimps. They survived through a few catastrophes when most of the cherries died. My daughter accidentally emptied a whole bottle of fish food in the tank and it was left as it is while I was overaseas. I came back in time to save a handful of females and a single male. My tank is now back to capacity with those few repopulating.

O suggest you have a small cycled tank for your Malaysian shrimps and then slowly mix the water of the two tanks and finally migrate them over.

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[limyw]

thanks. planning to have a dedicated shrimp planted tank soon and see if the shrimps can repopulate. probably look at cherry reds and leave out the malayans at this stage, esp if they cannabalise

[Jeremy747]

I used to have 3 in my tank. They were chocolate brown most of the time. Sometimes dark with a tinge of blue. There were a few occassions when they turn orange red, almost like my cherry shrimps. Unfortunately they don't reproduce easily.

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[stormhawk]

Malayan Shrimps have a pelagic stage with free-swimming shrimplets before they settle down to become the typical shrimplets like Cherry Shrimp babies.

It's best to have a good look at the Malayans before purchase, in case what they sold you was some other species. I had an Orange Shrimp, probably C. propinqua, in a bag of Malayans once, along with a feeder prawn and the occasional small Yamato in the bags. Typically Malayans have this "skunk" stripe running down the back. Some individuals will not have this stripe. Their different colors is famous though.

If you find some larger specimens preying on the smaller ones, they could be Macrobrachium shrimps mixed on or those feeder shrimp that sneaked in with the bags of Malayans. I never had problems with Malayans. In fact they spend more time hiding because of their cryptic coloration. The only time you'd spot them is feeding time.