Dozens and Dozens of Ghost Shrimp Babies!!!

[lotus flower]

Squee!!! Okay, so I just looked in my tank and I have dozens and dozens of ghost shrimp babies! At first, I thought it must be some sort of mites or daphnia, but then I saw they were hanging out in the Java moss, which I bought especially for ghost shrimp babies because I read they would feed on the infusoria that grow in there and be protected.

Squee!!! So, now that there are so many, I'm worried they'll starve in the tank. It's a 10-gallon and moderately heavily planted. I just added some salt to the tank because my betta seems to be having the start of fin-rot, but my parameters are good and have been at 0 ppm recently.

I am leaving town tomorrow for about a week, so I can't get an infusoria culture started. However, I have an UG filter and I know that I've had trapped plant matter in there--I did a whole bunch of vacuumings last week to try to clean out said plant matter, in fact. I also had a fungal issue, so I'd treated for the fungus briefly (half a day) and done the water changes.

I was going to do a 50% WC before I left town, but now I'm afraid that I'll get the shrimp caught in the vacuum hose! I don't know what to do! Any ideas? I have sponges over the outflow vents of the UG filter and have a very small cartridge carbon filter running, but it has a filter bag over it to reduce flow and the babies don't seem to be getting sucked into it.

Do you think I should do a WC anyway and risk losing babies? And do you think they will starve without infusoria cultured and injected? My mystery snail just died a couple days ago, so I supposed algae will be growing soon. They seem to be eating off the glass and the Java moss. Should I toss in a fragment of algae wafer? There are a few flakes and a betta pellet in there for the adults, but I think these guys are way too small to eat those yet. They must be newly hatched. I can see either a molted shrimp shell or a dead shrimp at the bottom that I need to remove, so I wonder if the mother didn't make it.

Any thoughts? I have some spoiled lettuce in the fridge I could scrape some detritus off of, I suppose....

[lotus flower]

Okay, so I read a tutorial online and got some of the lettuce leaves (not too rotten, actually) and put them in a mason jar with tank water and an algae wafer and it's sitting in the window until I come back (hopefully this will grow a good culture of infusoria).

I went ahead and squeezed off some brown soupy liquid from the lettuce bag (lots of tannins and some ammonia, I know, but hopefully some Euglena and other infusoria in there) and dropped a dribble into the tank. Maybe that will feed the little guys until I can get the proper culture growing. I'll put another couple drops in tomorrow before I leave.

I hope the little guys live...I love them so much! :1luvu:

[lotus flower]

Okay, so to update:

I still have maybe 1-2 dozen of the little guys swimming in my tank and hanging out in my java moss, but they aren't growing any larger. They are currently about the size of a grain of salt or even smaller...maybe half a grain of salt. On one or two of them, though, I could swear I saw what appeared to me like uropoda, which made me think they were shrimp babies.

So my thinking is that they may be rotifers of some sort, or maybe some kind of Cladoceran like Daphnia. I've been feeding Infusoria and lettuce leaves, which they seem to be feeding off of with frequency.

Has anyone ever had little crustaceans appear in their tank for no apparent reason? I'm baffled by how they arrived in my tank--maybe they survived the freeze-drying process of the brine shrimp pellets I feed? Otherwise, they hitched a ride on plants, I guess.

I mean, if it were ich, which I don't suspect it is, I wouldn't be able to see them free-swimming and not for weeks on end, right?