Here's the unfortunate truth about keeping shrimp.
Sometimes, they die.
What's even harder to deal with is that sometimes, one passes away for no particular reason that
you can discern and the others do completely fine.
What's worse is when you have a buried female that passes away because that means all the
eggs on her swimmerets will most likely rot and die.
The good news is even without mama shrimp fanning the eggs, you can artificially do
this yourself and possibly save the eggs.
In order to do this, we use what's known as an egg tumbler.
Now, the good news is you can build this thing pretty cheaply.
I did it with some spare parts lying around my fish room.
It's quite simple, really.
You have an air pump, airline hose, an airline adjustment valve to allow different amounts
of air to go through, a clear tube, something to hold the tube upright, some netting on
the bottom to make sure the eggs don't fall through and allow water to flow up, and a
rubber band to keep everything in place.
Now, what this does is it pumps oxygen or air, whatever you want to call it at the moment,
into the tube which creates a vacuum that then gets filled by the water creating an
upward flow.
Now, this is important because as you can see here, we got a little demonstration.
Now, these are not shrimp eggs.
This is just a few pieces of carbon, but by being able to adjust the air rate coming out
of this hose, we can adjust the flow rate of the water coming through the bottom which
means the eggs will bounce up and down, much like you see the carbon right here.
That is how we can artificially tumble the eggs from a mama shrimp that has passed away
for whatever reason, allowing the eggs to grow to fruition and then hatch.
Although, we do our very best to keep our little buddies alive and happy, sometimes,
something happens and there's just nothing you can do about it at the end of the day.
That doesn't mean you can't do anything for the little babies, though.
What we're going to do is we're going to take mama shrimp out of the breeder net here, place
her on a flat piece of glass, and remove the eggs from her swimmerets.
Now, you might be wondering how to do this.
One important thing to note about the eggs on the swimmerets is they're on there kind
of like with glue, almost.
See, when mama shrimp has her eggs, it's like some sort of biological sticky substance that
keeps them bound to her swimmerets.
That's why she can fan them and swim around without them falling off.
Now, consequently or coincidentally, I should say, if mama shrimp happens to molt with the
eggs on her swimmerets, the molt will also keep the eggs, meaning mama shrimp will not
be able to take care of the eggs anymore.
That's another case in which you can do this particular process.
To separate the eggs from mama shrimp, one of the easiest methods of doing this is using
toothpicks.
This will give you a fine enough precision to separate the eggs from the swimmerets.
They'll probably come out in few bits of clumps but you want to separate them and try and
keep them as separate from each other as possible because you want them to bounce around in
here.
Let's go ahead and transfer this little tumbler into here and get the eggs off of mama shrimp.
Depending on the color of shrimp and how soon after death you find the shrimp, it's going
to be easiest to this on an opaque surface.
Now, I also have a spoon here because when I separate the eggs from the mama shrimp,
I want to put them on a surface where they are not going to fall off and I won't lose
them when I'm transferring them from this space over to the egg tumbler.
You have to be very careful.
You see there's a bunch of eggs and we just have to separate them.
Now, unfortunately, because I'm holding the camera, I won't be able to show you this particular
process but once the eggs are separated, we can go from there.
Now, as you can see, I have separated the eggs from the mama shrimp.
This process really isn't for the faint of heart.
You have to keep the shrimp very steady because the eggs are very sticky and they don't want
to come off of the swimmerets.
In order to keep a shrimp steady, what I do is I have to poke the toothpick through the
center of her body and use the other toothpick to apply some light pressure and scrape it
off.
Sometimes, you have to pick in between the swimmerets to get the last few but you should
end up with something like this.
Now, all that remains to be done is to transfer these eggs into the tumbler.
This is a very delicate process because you don't want to lose the eggs.
Now, like I said, I use a spoon when transferring from my work location in this case, it's not
like I've done this a lot, I'm still practicing myself, but you're going to want something
to make sure these little eggs don't go flying everywhere.
See how I've got a clump of eggs sticking to the end of this toothpick.
They are very sticky as I said.
This is just a quick little demonstration to show you.
Now, I've gotten lucky here with the stickiness that I have with the eggs.
I've already transferred some into the tube, but since I have a few more here, I'm going
to do something a little risky to show you how to get it in the tube, being very careful.
You want to pull the tube outside of the water.
What you'll do is stick the toothpicks in the water to remove them from the toothpicks.
You'll notice that they'll float for a little bit.
We give it a few minutes, they will start to sink down and when they sink down, you
should be able to see them down at the bottom here.
We really zoom in and at the bottom of the net, you see one's sinking down right now,
we caught and in this case, the net is not as tight as it should've been.
That's one thing you might want to consider is how close the netting is to everything
because you don't want eggs to fall down.
You want eggs to get in the net.
At this point, we've come to the process that requires the most delicate of precision, I
would say, which is adjusting the air flow to the little hole that we have up here because
if you adjust it too quick and too much air comes out, that little egg, the one you see
falling right down there will shoot right up out of the tube and then go floating around
somewhere else in the tank.
Now, the top of the tube is above the waterline at the moment.
Once all the eggs have sunk down, you need to have the top of the tube underneath the
waterline.
This is the point where people would add a top piece of netting as well.
As you can see, you got to be very, very careful because we've lost a few eggs because the
netting is not perfect.
Well, let's go ahead, start adjusting the water flow.
We've got very few bubbles coming up because, unlike the carbon, it does not take a lot
of water flow to move these eggs.
You can see they're just tumbling around in there.
As long as you keep them tumbling and they don't fall out like a few of mine
have done, unfortunately, then theoretically, the eggs should come to fruition because you
are now simulating what mama shrimp would be doing which is fanning the eggs back and
forth.
Now, there's good reasons for it.
If you don't know what the reasons are, it's worth Googling if you want to learn more about
how tumbling works, but you want to make sure it's a very delicate tumble.
Like I said, barely any bubbles and we're already getting on and getting them floating
around.
The process works so far and if we're lucky, we'll have baby shrimps in just a few weeks.
That is how to save the eggs off of a passed away, buried mama shrimp.
I hope this video helps you all.
Hope you did a little better of a net design than I did.
As long as you do that, I think you should be perfectly fine.
Thanks for watching, guys.
If this video helps, please give it a thumbs up.
It helps me a lot.
Don't forget to comment, rate, subscribe, show your friends, check out my other videos.
I got plenty of them and as always, I will see you next time.
Stay fishy.