Murderous Scarlet Cleaner Shrimp
Posted by Shari Horowitz in Tropical Fish Hobbyist Blog on November 11, 2011 at 9:38 am
Cleaner shrimp (Lysmata amboinensis). Photograph by M.P. & C. Piednoir
The scarlet cleaner shrimp has a well-deserved reputation as being the among best cleaner shrimp you can keep in a tank, and therefore they are often recommended for beginners. They are great additions to a tank because they are hardy, will accept prepared foods, and will clean their tankmates as needed. But recent research at the University of Tübingen in Germany has revealed that scarlet cleaners don’t always play nicely with the other children.
Janine Wong and Prof Nico Michiels ran a controlled experiment in which groups of two, three, or four shrimp of about the same size were placed into aquariums with unlimited access to food. In less than two months they found that in groups larger than two, one or more scarlet cleaners were attacked and killed by the others during the night! The upshot for the home aquarist is to make sure to never include more than two scarlet cleaner shrimp in the same tank, just to be on the safe side.
Source: http://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=84362101905
Tags: crustaceans, Lysmata amboinensis, marine shrimp, Scarlet Cleaner Shrimp
I have kept groups up to 10 of these in tanks on numerous occasions with only rare issues of significant aggression. I’m wondering about the tank sizes and decor in the experimental tanks. If they were bare or minimally aquascaped tanks, especially if they were also small, that could explain the observed behavior.