A lesson learnt

[Baccus]

First some history.... the other week I was mucking about in my 4ft cory tank and moved a heap of plants while I did some rearranging and head counting of Barney Springs shrimp. As a temp measure I put everything I took out of the tank into a large tub of water to ensure no shrimp hitch hikers ended up on the floor. I put all the stuff back in the tank and left the tub of water to age in the shed where my tanks are. Only the cat and the dog where drinking out of the tub and I didn't give it much more thought.

Fast forward to just the other day, and I needed to do a drop and top on my native shrimp tank (has blackmore river shrimp, red nose and chameleons as well as spotted blue eyes as well as some native snails), and thought I know I'll use the nicely aged tub of water up. It had a few mozzie wrigglers in it which I figured the blue eyes would enjoy. And I blissfully started doing the water change.

When I had almost finished I noticed a small fry swimming oddly in the tank. At first I thought it was a blue eye fry that hadn't liked the water change to much. But the size and swimming was wrong. So I looked more closely and low and behold it was a cory fry. There must have been a cory egg on the plants etc when I was mucking about in the cory tank and using the same tub of water, the egg must have got knocked loose and the egg ended up hatching in the tub of water.

So now because its going to be all but impossible to recatch the cory my native tank now has a south American intruder. Just as well I know the cory wont do any harm to the shrimp.

So from now on when using any aged water that I have had plants from tanks containing egg laying fish I am going to be much more careful checking no one has hatched in the water before I use it else where.

[ineke]

that has happened to me too, only i had a tiny bit of water in a plastic ice cream container with some moss in it. when i finally put the moss to use i had several tiny shrimp left in the ice cream container. it had been a good week with minimum water before i used the moss . the babies must have just been released. doesnt matter how careful we are there seems to be hitch hikers

[Wraithie]

The worst part about hitchhikers: you can't add them to existing colonies, but you can't get rid of them...mts...

one of my hitchhikers is a 'Canary Shrimp'