Amanos Messing About

I've got 14 amanos in my tank and generally they hide away or busy themselves on the bogwood or stones all day. However, earlier almost all of them were swimming about all over the place. This only lasted for about 5 minutes and was shortly after I added Algexit to the tank. I added a bit less than the instructions suggest since there's no issue with algae, I just want to avoid the bogwood going green.

Anyway, does anyone know if shrimp have an issue with algae treatments? I've used it before with no issue and no reaction from the shrimp. All the other fish seemed unaffected, last water change was yesterday and all tests are as they should be.

It's now 30 mins later and shrimp are back to normal. Was it just a funny 5 minutes?!?

Two possibilities:

They didn't like the stuff you added

A female had released "ready to mate" pheromones and the male shrimps were looking for her. The males do swim like crazy all over the tank to find the female. But if the females were doing it as well, that rules this option out.

@Matt - No, I don't think it contains copper. At least, there's no mention on the bottle (or by googling it).

@Sue - This may be a silly question, but how I identify females? They've never reacted like this to this (or anything else) before, so I'm optimistic that it was coincidence.

@fmcf - No, not at all, not even when feeding. In fact, they couldn't ignore me more if they tried!

Wow! That certainly seems similar to what happened, but I didn't notice a female being mobbed (but it didn't last long enough to really see). I'm yet to identify any females as my lighting timer went off shortly after my last post and I didn't want to bother the little guys, so will see if I can work it out tomorrow.

If they are breeding that would amaze me since this is my first tank and I've only had it 2 months! Having read the info on the link I reckon shrimp breeding is a few leagues of expertise beyond me right now! Mind you, if I see more solid evidence I might get advice from my LFS and try it... after all, even Accrington Stanley enter the FA Cup right!?! 

There is more than one species sold as amanos, but with the ones I had a few years ago males had dots down their sides while females had dashes. And if it was a female releasing hormones, she would have laid eggs very shortly afterwards. Females carry the eggs under their abdomens between the swimmerets and you can see them looking like a cluster of berries. However, amano shrimp eggs hatch into larvae which need salt water to grow so you won't see any baby amanos in a freshwater tank.

I can totally connect with the: "a bit of paranoia and newbie naivety..."  thing Geoff... 

It really is tricky as a newcomer to a hobby that actually starts with advanced needs long before us young (lol) pups have picked up the knowledge and experience... 

As for Amanos, I have a dozen of them, although you never see them all at any one time, and they did a sterling job of munching down the excess algae I had in the tank which I had encouraged by being clueless about photoperiod requirements and had been leaving the lights on waaaaaaaay too long...!!!  Now they have munched their way through that, they have become accomplished drive-by fish food snatchers...!!!   

I have amano shrimp in several tanks, and was also concerned the first time I saw this unusual behaviour.
This is one of my females in a previous tank, which caused quite a stir amongst the males. Eventually she climbed up a plant to release the eggs, and was surrounded by the penguin tetras who made the most of the free meal.
I had considered trying to breed these shrimp, as I already have some experience with brackish tanks, but after researching it I decided that it was difficult with very little chance of success.
The second pic is one of my little fellas stealing an entire algae wafer from the BN plec. Cheeky monkey. 

With 5 stiphodons and an army of red cherry shrimps (which are nowhere near as bad as amanos) to feed, I crush algae wafers to small pellets, soak them in water, then add them to the tank.

When I had amano shrimps several years ago one of the females was the biggest creature in my tank. She was bigger than dwarf chain loaches.

Amano Mob update:  got the full size Hikari algae wafers today...  Popped one in and by jove it brought all 12 Amano shrimp into full view - a very rare sight...!!! 

Zero chance of them swimming off with these monster biscuits, but crickey they still have a go at dragging it off...!!!   

Tried the crushing smaller algae wafers t'other day...  Worked really well, too...  I'll continue doing that when targeting the shrimp I think... 

Also...  @ Geoffish ...  How are your Amanos doing...?

Or all of them 

I love shrimps - and snails though a lot of people can't stand the thought of snails. I have already decided that when water changes on my 180 litre get too much for me, I want 2 small tanks - one for a betta and one for my shrimps.