My Straw (Perlatus) baby thread

[fraksocks]

My wife thinks after this try if I'm not successful, to just wait a few months then try again. So at least she's on board with it happening again. One of the main reasons I can't keep it up for long is she gets stuck with a lot of the house/kids work while I'm busy with the crabs.

Yay for supportive spouses and family! The whole process sounds incredibly labor intensive and has to be tough on everyone involved.

[kuza]

It sure is!

I have also witnessed my first zoea on zoea attack, where they were leg locked for a while and one of them ended up dead.... So I guess the fighting starts even before the megalopa stage if they manage to get a hold of each other.

I still have a boatload of videos to upload from the last attempt, many megalopa swimming and shell shopping but for now I'll focus on the new attempt #2!

Here's the new setup so I can run more jars. I could potentially have 16 jars going at once here but it would be tight and I'd have to warm up my fresh water in a 3rd tank, but I'm tempted to do it. However this was initially setup so I can run 6 jars easily with 6 jars ready to switch in at each water change;



And here's the new babies, they have just molted when I took this so they should all be stage 2. They are getting fat, orange and feisty so hopefully I get lots of healthy megalopa in about a week again;



Since this evening I think I have late molters, or some have already molted for the second time. It's so hard to tell since some molt early and some molt late. It's possible I have zoea of stage 2 and 3 right now.

[aussieJJDude]

Nice

[naalide]

@kuza:
Funny! My PP-larvae are nearly as red as your straws.

[kuza]

it's the food for sure!

[Nat_addicted to HC's]

I gather nothing has arrived in the post yet. Delivery confirmation has not arrived here.

[kuza]

not yet

[kuza]

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I've been loosing them in droves in stage 3 this time around. I haven't done anything different. Is it possible the eggs weren't as good this time around? I feel like they have had a lot more trouble molting this attempt and they haven't gotten as big. It may just be the lighting, but I feel like I've lost like 50% since the time I took those last pictures, which was 1 stage ago.

[aussieJJDude]

So sorry to hear about that Kuza, your doing your best, keep trying!

[Curlz]

*sigh* Can be all ... In my opinion too many larvae.
But it maybe little temperature changings, maybe salt intensity (salinity) changings. Non good Artemia eggs. Too little food. And yes, maybe bad larvae.


How old are they now? (sorry because of my own project I did not get all threads in here)

I have a statstic of my 4th to 7th experiment. A statistic of the death rate.

Left side = Larvae quantity
below = days

Each experiment has an own color:
blue line = 4th (successull)
red line = 5th (died all in megalopa stage)
green line = 6th (worst try died all very fast - probably less salinity or bad larvae)
purple line = 7th (looked all good till they died at megalopa stage)




You can see that they nearly all went down at nearly the same time. Molting time in my opinion.

[kuza]

Yes I lose them in the molting stages for sure.

[kuza]

*sigh* Can be all ... In my opinion too many larvae.

I only had about 50-100 per jar this time when last time I had hundreds per jar and they did much better. I think it might have been overfeeding, too many brine shrimp.

[kuza]

Had the first megalopa at day 16 again, like clockwork. However I think he`s stuck in his exo, still so he`s not looking good. No others have turned yet.

[parrothead]

Yes I lose them in the molting stages for sure.

It's interesting that the molting stage seems to be the most troublesome. Same applies to our wild captured crabs during their captive molts.

[kuza]

today I have at least 3 or 4 megalopa that looks fairly healthy. Working on separating them into their own jars right now.