Coral Banded Shrimp Vanished

[mcaswell]

Had a small coral banded shrimp in my 5.5g tank on my desk, and this morning he was gone.  Pulled the rocks out to make sure he wasn't clinging out of sight, but there's absolutely no sign of him.  My first thought was that maybe he jumped out (do shrimp do that?) since I've been leaving the tank uncovered lately, but I've looked all around my desk and on the floor, and I don't see him.  There's a purple dottyback in there at the moment, as well as a few blue-leg hermit crabs and some snails... I assume if the shrimp died overnight and the other inhabitants decided to make his carcass a late-night snack, there'd at least be SOMETHING left behind.

[Mckinney0171]

Might be molting.  They will sometimes disappear when they molt.

[pntbll687]

I'm guessing it's hiding or molting.

 

fish and shrimp are like that. I have a 4-5in goby in my 200g tank. Haven't seen it in months, I stirred the sand when my wave maker decided to come off its base and BOOM, there's the goby.

 

i would just wait it out, probably in there somewhere 

[SouthFlorida_Tron]

Messing with rocks just to find him is probably not a good idea...

[mcaswell]

It’s a small tank, with only a few rocks.  If he was dead in there, I wanted to find him to prevent an ammonia spike.

Oh, and he did molt 3 or 4days ago.

[1891Bro]

If it's gone you're in luck. Those things are monsters. 

[mcaswell]

LOL... he was pretty well behaved, as is the larger one that's in my 32g tank.  But that arrow crab I had for a short time... THAT guy was a terror.

 

I had gotten a ball of chaeto from a fellow local reefer, and when I was getting ready to put it in, I noticed several of those little mini brittle starfish, which I decided I'd put in the display portion of the tank instead.  As I dropped the first one in, I was focused on making sure the fish didn't try to nip at it as it descended, and didn't notice that I had unknowingly dropped it right into the path of where the arrow crab was hanging out.  He snatched the starfish as it drifted down in front of him, and to my horror started munching on it.  I quickly grabbed a fish food pellet, which I offered to him with the hopes that he would drop the starfish in favor of a tastier meal.  No, instead he simply held on to the starfish with one claw while eating the pellet with the other.  So I sent down another pellet, and that still didn't convince him to let go.

 

That, combined with some other rude behavior caused him to go back to the LFS shortly thereafter.

[BlennyBoi]

On 8/24/2017 at 9:55 AM, 1891Bro said:

If it's gone you're in luck. Those things are monsters. 

can agree. mine ate 2 hermits, a bunch of xenia, and a clownfish. he has now been banished to the sump