# Molting with eggs



## hotweldfire (17 Jun 2012)

I've seen a lot of berried blue pearls in my main tank over the last couple of months. Those of you who know what happened to the shrimp in that tank a few months ago will know what a relief it is for me to see berried shrimp again. 

However, I've not seen one shrimplet. Not one. Conditions in the tank are the same as they were when I had a very active sakura breeding colony in there. Only changes are the addition of 6 threadfin rainbows and higher levels of EI dosing. I was starting to fear that there was some residual poison left over from the PlantedTanks insecticide. Then today I saw this (apologies for awful photo):


2012-5-17_21.59.28 by hotweldfire, on Flickr

If you can't make it out it's not a dead shrimp, it's a moulted shell with eggs attached. I'm wondering if this might account for no babies. Maybe the berried shrimp are losing their eggs when they moult? Should they even be moulting when berried? I've never seen this before. Anyone have any idea what causes it?


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## Liam (18 Jun 2012)

It may not be anything to worry about, sometimes some of the eggs don’t hatch and are left stuck to the shell and got rid of with the moult, if the shrimp does not moult soon after the eggs have hatched she will remove them herself. I have seen once or twice a shrimp moult with a full lot of undeveloped eggs, don’t know the cause, it’s like a miscarriage I guess.  There are about five eggs in the moult, so hopefully the rest have hatched. I don’t know if there are any long term problems from the poison, the one time I had a similar experience the surviving shrimp seemed to carry on as normal, breeding etc.


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## Otto72 (18 Jun 2012)

Can you point me to the thread where your tank got poisoned from plants from the PlantedTank. Lucky I saw this thread, thats where I was going to order my plants from! Whats the best place in the uk to order shrimp safe plants from?


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