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Shrimp Collecting / My car smells like @ss


thedude

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Had a great time this weekend in Port Aransas and found all kinds of cool stuff collecting:

We found:

-Sargassum shrimp

-ghost shrimp

-blue crabs

-some kind of weird green pointy shrimp

-unidentified crabs

-blennies

-a baby flounder

-a baby grunt

-a seahorse

-4 pipefish

and about 200 peppermints.

Now come the part about my car stinking....

Outside of Beeville on the way home we stopped for gas. The car was smelling unusually ripe even for one filled with sea creatures. We checked on the critters and everything seemed to be ok, but were having trouble with the two air pumps shutting off randomly.

Come home and find out that out of the 200 peps, probably 30 were alive and those went immediately into my tank. We'll see how many survive but let me tell you, it sucked.

Lesson learned for the future... collect the peppermints quickly and have a tank ready for them.

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What water did you keep them in on the way home? Was it ocean water?

Ocean water will foul within minutes to hours, depending on what's in it (plankton, contaminates, etc.). I can't tell you how many times I collected stuff, like shrimp, in Florida only to find it dead 20 minutes later when I got home. The best thing to do, albeit the biggest pain in the a-- is to bring synthetic water with you and acclimate everything to that water. It's a pain, but it works! Everything I collected with synthetic has lived, even coral and inverts. I would take jugs of it and keep it on the boat with a small airpump/airstone going.

Another thing we'd do is rig the livewell on the boat with baskets to keep small collected animals in. It wasn't ideal, but worked too.

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Amazingly enough, I had read that synthetic water was much better to transport creatures and I did mix up sea water and bring it with me. Anthony Calfo's book of coral propogation recommends this and discusses the dangers of using "fresh" ocean water. So the real kicker... one bucket was synthetic, one was straight nasty ocean water... the ocean water bucket fared much better than the synthetic one.

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I came home with 3 little blennies. Well, they range from "little" to "really tiny". I moved the thin-striped hermit crab who got me started on all this into the sump (along with a red-leffed hermit crab who was in solitary for chronic snail molestation... unless she learns to hide, she'll be a snack one day... sigh) and put the blennies in the 1.5 gallon tank. I know it's still way too small, but it's the only thing I have that remotely resembles a QT. I nervously put them through a freshwater dip. It went fine, although the smallest one tried to jump after only about 15 seconds. I took that as a sign of stress and ended her dip at that point.

They have been in NSW with a small airstone (in a cooler). The bubbler quit some time last night. Neither seems to have fazed them in the least. I put some algae on a clip for them last night and this morning it was *all* gone (I was surprised they ate that much!). Now they're all jumping around the substrate trying to find a comfy spot and none of them seem particularly stressed at this point.

I'm not sure what I'll do if they all survive because I think that's just too many for my little tank. And when they are done with the QT, I'll have to see how Joey (Neon Velvet Damsel) reacts. It *is* his tank, after all, at least in his mind.

Anyway, the trip was great fun and I'm glad I went.

ej

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Gabe,

Didn't answer the question because all the shrimp were continuing to die. I don't have many left at this point at all that I can see. I flushed 24, the wrasse had to have eaten a few (as I saw him with one in his mouth) and really I've only seen one in the past 8 hours. Things aren't looking so hot for my peppermint shrimp collecting experience.

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