I have a bamboo shrimp. I went to the pet store one day looking for critters (something besides fish). All they had was a unique little brown guy, called a bamboo shrimp. I found a website that has some good info:
http://www.petshrimp.com/bambooshrimp.html
Here is a photo from the website:
I took him home and put him in the 55-gallon tank. He was kind of interesting, but didn’t do much. The next morning when I came downstairs to feed the fish, the little guy was gone. Lying suspiciously on the floor was a bamboo shrimp sized carapace. I thought at first that he had molted, but since I couldn’t find him anywhere I had to conclude that it had been eaten. I was devastated. Well, I hope whoever ate him enjoyed their little $6.00 snack. Anyway, I figured that’s what keeping an aquarium is all about: experimenting with different combinations of species.
Then about three months later I see something sailing around the tank in long, graceful arcs, finally coming to rest on the top of a log. I knew I didn’t have any fish that size in that tank—just otocinclus, which dart and wiggle. When I took a closer look, I found it was my little bamboo shrimp. I tried netting it so I could put it in the smaller tank (and maybe I’d see it more than once in a blue moon), but it got away and promptly vanished.
I think I’ll name it Hale-Bopp since he appears about as often—every 4,200 years (okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration). Comet Hale-Bopp appeared auspiciously in the sky, two months after my wife and I got married in 1997, a dazzling white smudge, which felt very gratifying after missing out on Haley’s comet (BOOOOO!), a mere, brief cosmic event, a fleeting wonder to behold. Just like my little bamboo shrimp.
