Meeting Abstract
Life history strategies of organisms impact their abilities to recover from disturbances, and provide important information for species management plans. Most aspects of life history remain unknown for Ancylomenes pedersoni (Pederson cleaner shrimp) which is a major remover of fish ectoparasites on Caribbean coral reefs. Pederson cleaner shrimp occur on giant sea anemones as obligate symbionts. This project investigated major reproductive traits of this important shrimp species, including minimum size at reproduction and duration of egg incubation. A. pedersoni were cultured in the laboratory in closed-system aquaria. We found that the smallest reproductive female had a carapace length of 2.9mm and that development of the eggs in the ovaries lasted an average of 13.13 (+/-6.28) days and incubation of eggs (eggs being held in the abdomen) lasted an average of 3.25 (+/- 1.73) days before being released. This project also examined their reproductive strategies, to assess whether isolated females can produce eggs and thus whether sperm storage, simultaneous hermaphroditism or parthenogenesis occurs in this species. Three individual females, three juveniles and three pairs of females also were placed in separate tanks and egg production was observed daily over the course of eight weeks. While many individuals produced eggs, cleavage of the eggs did not occur after the first week, except in two shrimp during the last two weeks of observations which were with another shrimp classified as a juvenile/male. None of the paired females or isolated females showed cleavage in their eggs throughout the experiment and the isolated juveniles did not produce eggs at all suggesting that parthenogenesis did not occur in this study. In conclusion, we have demonstrated a three day incubation of eggs without fertilization in this species and our data suggest that parthenogenesis is unlikely.
