Sydney native shrimp

[peneye]

Hi all,

I joined this forum a couple of months ago but my P.C. died soon after joining & I have been unable to post until now so this post is to firstly say hi & also share a recent experience I had.I recently had to go to a dam in Sydney for work purposes & though I thought I wouldn't get an opportunity for any exploring for aquatic life while I was there I took an aquarium scoop net with me just in case.I managed to sqeeze in 5-10 minutes with my net at a small section of rocks along the shoreline.I saw a few small fish that I assumed were Gambusia & attempted to net one to confirm it's identity,when I checked the net to see if I had caught any I was suriprised to find no fish but 2-3 glass shrimp in the net.The only container on hand was a small plastic drink bottle so I filled it with some water & tried to transfer the shrimp to get a good look at them.I had a few more scoops & managed a few more shrimp, most escaped when I tried to transfer them from the net through the small opening into the bottle.Most of the shrimp looked at first glance to be juvies & males with a couple of larger females.When I had a closer look I noticed that there was some with nippers that were young Macrobrachiums & not glass shrimp.I had never seen any Macrobachiums except in tropical areas way north of here & did a search on the internet & found that there is more than one type that occur in the Sydney area,but all info I could find said that they need salt water for the baby shrimp to survive,yet the dam is isolated from salt water & there is young present in the dam, can anyone shed light on how this is possible?

[mr_c265]

There are Machrobrachiums in the blue mountains too, they don't all need salt water. Good find. Was the dam at manly by any chance?

[fishmosy]

Hey peneye, welcome to the forum.

There are two possibilities/explanations. One is that the shrimp you saw were not macrobrachium, but were something like Parataya australilensis, which also possess small nippers. The second is that they are in fact macrobrachium, as these can breed in freshwater (for example I've caught them in the feeder rivers for the Murray river in North western NSW, hundreds if not a thousand km from any saltwater.

[agbart]

They would have been macrobrachium australiense, you can catch them in just about any river and dam in NSW. I use a $7 shrimp trap and some tasty cheese, 15 mins in the water and you'll have a few handfulls in the trap. I had them in my tank for a while but have since gotten rid of them, there's some pics of them in my thread in the journals forum.

P.S They make good bait for catching cod.

P.P.S Yay, I'm now a "Shrimp Enthusiast".

[peneye]

There are Machrobrachiums in the blue mountains too' date=' they don't all need salt water. Good find. Was the dam at manly by any chance?[/quote']

P.M. sent