camel shrimp had babies?

[Tphill]

I think my camel shrimp had babies. I got home from work today and my 75G tank has all these little white things floating around in it. I got the magnifying lens and got as good a look as I could at one of them, and they are a small white dot with a thread tail, 100's of them. I started looking at things in the tank to see if I could figure out where they came from. All that's in the tank is a few zoas/paly's, 4 various leather corals(green finger leather, loco lobo, long polyp toadstool, toadstool) a couple ricordea Florida's, and a large mat of GSP(soon to be removed). In the sump I have a turbo snail, some cheato, some kind of red macro algae, and one camel shrimp, the one that I've caught so far out of the other tank. The reason I think it is babies from the camel shrimp is that while I was looking around, I saw a fairly dense cloud of these white things come up from the back corner of the refugium, I then looked closer in that corner and saw the shrimp back there. Anyone else have this happen? Any other ideas what these could be? Thanks.

 

[Connie]

It sounds like copepods to me. If there was a cloud of them in the corner, the camel shrimp was probably back there feeding on them.

 

[Tphill]

Could be, I just got a batch of cheato last week from a fellow R2R member here in Alabama. But I just went and watched a couple of youtube video's about shrimp breeding, and these things look exactly like what is on those video's. There are no fish in the tank yet, the first 2 that were to go in was a purple firefish and a spotted cardinal. The firefish didn't make it through qt, and the cardinal is still in qt, with 2 weeks left. Been debating on whether or not to just go ahead and put the cardinal in there a couple weeks ahead of schedule and maybe he could eat whatever those things are. Any thoughts there?

 

[Connie]

Since that is the only fish you have, I don't see a problem with it.

 

[Tphill]

I'm going to start the acclimation process now.