I’ve kept camel shrimp a few times. They’re rumored to eat coral so I’ve mostly kept them in a refugium; most recently they’re in a bare tank with a pair of clownfish.
I haven’t found them to be especially durable. They’re short-lived even in an otherwise healthy tank, and often the males stop molting and get a lot of weird fuzz and growth on their claws and antennae. It may be that they’re dying due to violence, although my understanding is that they live in large groups in the wild.
The good news is that they’re sequential hermaphrodites, so starting with smaller shrimp I’ve always ended up with mixed sexes. I waited a long time for this species to spawn, but they may have been spawning all along and I just didn’t notice. The eggs are always hidden up under pleopods and weren’t at all noticeable until I accidentally backlit them; the first photo above is a berried female light from behind, the second with front lighting.
Once I noticed that there were eggs, collecting the zooeas was easy. I moved the female to a livebearer trap in a slightly smaller tank and had a short wait before there were a few hundred fairly large larvae.
I moved the zooeas into about 15 gallons of salt water in a black round tub, and a whole lot of them immediately turned up dead stuck to the surface; I turned up the aeration which solved the stuck-to-the-surface problem but in a few days all the zooaes had vanished.
After some discussion with a more successful breeder, I tried again this time with very, very little turbulence in the tub, only a slight occasional bubble. The same early die off repeated but after that the larvae survived for quite some time. I fed them baby brine shrimp from day one (slightly enriched with Selcon) and there was also a healthy nannochloropsis culture blooming in the tub.
I kept a single, small LED light over the tub on 24/7 to keep the phyto blooming. The tub was unheated but on the floor in a temperature-controlled room so should have stayed at fairly steady 25C.
Die-off rates were steady, but growth rates very unsteady, which has me thinking that the larger larvae were probably eating the smaller ones. After a couple of weeks the larger larvae had enormous oar legs, proving that they were definitely growing and developing.
As always, my main struggle with the black round tub was water quality. I kept water changes to a minimum in order to avoid turbulence and vacuuming out the little shrimp; I tested ammonia levels frequently and there was never a spike, but I think it likely that nitrate eventually accumulated to a lethal level. By day 30 the phyto in the tub was /very/ dense, and only a few large larvae were still visible on the surface.
I also needed to travel for a week around day 24, so it’s possible there was an ammonia or nitrite spike in my absence, but I doubt it.
I hoped that this was because of settlement, but when I finally drained the tub to inspect the bottom I didn’t find any post-larvae.
If I get to make another attempt with these I will need to figure out a way to include a protein skimmer or make frequent water changes. I will also skip the Selcon as I suspect it was just adding useless bioload. I think I was quite close to success so I’m hopeful that I’ll get postlarvae next time if I’m able to keep nitrate levels under control.