Shrimp, Oh Shrimp...

Continuing the ever growing drama that is my fish tank...

So I wrote a week or so ago that my female shrimp had her eggs hatch. What I didn't get to mention last week (thanks finals...) was the fact she has another clutch of eggs!

Her eggs hatched, the next day I noticed the entire egg area was cleaned out of unhatched eggs and the egg shells (or whatever the eggs are made out of). Then I noticed the female was picking on the male. The next day I see that the male is chasing my female around and freaking her out. I know she had another set of eggs ready (you can see them developing), but I was hoping she'd wait. Well...later that day I went to check on her because I was worried the male was harassing her. I see her swim away from the male and she has a whole new set of eggs... :

Apparently I am now into the shrimp breeding business! I may have to give my male shrimp back to the pet store. I am just not set up to be a shrimp breeder. You'd think these shrimp would understand that too. It's only a 6gal tank for goodness sakes! I'm just lucky, so far, that no babies have shown up. If they start showing up, I am in some serious trouble...

So let's do some math. It took her about 4.5 weeks to have her eggs. My other female shrimp is about a week behind her. That means my 2nd female will be having her eggs sometime this week that I'm gone and I also know she has developing eggs. Therefore, by the time I return to Santa Barbara, I should have two roughly-recently pregnant shrimp. If there are 52 weeks in a year and it takes them about 4.5 weeks to hatch a set of eggs and I have 2 females...That's about 23 hatchings a year! Too much...Too much!

With that said...time to go. Next posting will be a movie update: Up in the Air, Where the Wild Things Are, Did You Hear About the Morgans, and Ponyo (as soon as I watch it...it's in my room on DVD).

Oh...last thing...A- in coastal marine law and policy and B+ in environmental biogeochemistry. Kind of proud of that B+ considering I failed the midterm. LoL I have learned I will never be a biogeochemist in any form or way because those chemical transformations kill me...