Preliminary experiments on the culture of the banded coral shrimp Stenopus hispidus Oliver- Winter School on Recent Advances in Breeding and Larviculture of Marine Finfish and Shellfish
The banded coral shrimp, Stenopus hispidus Oliver, is the largest of the known “cleaner” shrimps which remove
and eat parasites, injured tissue, and undesirable food particles from a large variety of reef fishes and helps to control
gill, oral, and external parasites reef fishes as does by cleaner wrasses (Limbaugh et al., 1961). S. hispidus occurs
throughout the Indo-Pacific region (Holthius, 1946). It is usually found in pairs in a variety of reef habitats, including
under coral ledges and in natural depressions in rock formations, where reef fishes come to be cleaned. In addition to
its useful ecological role, the banded coral shrimp is also a beautiful and hardy specimen, which makes it very popular
in the aquarium industry. Because of this popularity, a number of attempts have been carried out to breed it on a
commercial scale, but none has succeeded due to high larval mortality and failure of the larvae to settle and
metamorphose (Young, 1979). The purpose of this work was to study the reproductive cycle of S. hispidus, including
maturation, mating, spawning, and hatching rate, to develop techniques for rearing larvae and inducing settlement
and metamorphosis of larvae