Since we live on the Gulf of Mexico, we make one or two trips out a week to catch shrimp for the seahorses. We started out finding ghost shrimp.
We found an area that was loaded with little ghost shrimp. We would catch about 100 – 200 at a time. We would bring them back and store them a in small tank and feed the seahorses for a few days. We where never really to keen on feeding the seahorses just live brine. As you can see, the ghost shrimp get too big for the smaller seahorses to eat. And they are very aggressive eaters. So we limit the number of ghost shrimp in the tank to about 10. Just enough to eat any left over food.

As we looked for other areas that had ghost shrimp we started coming across some really wild looking shrimp.
This shrimp has a sharp needle nose. When we first caught them we where putting them in a Styrofoam cooler to transport them. As it turns out their noses are so sharp that when we got home the cooler looked like a dartboard with little shrimp stuck in all of the sides. They come in bright green, red, brown and grey. At first the seahorse seemed to like these shrimp but after a couple feedings the seahorses just stopped eating them. I guess they are a lot like eating sticks. Not much fun and not much nourishment.

After more searching we came across these little tiny shrimp. These shrimp are less than a 1/4 of an inch. They are so small at first we never noticed them. We had put some grass in the tank and the seahorse dove right in snapping away like mad. We thought that there may have been a large group of copepods. But further inspection we noticed these little shrimp running for the rocks and on the glass. So the next time we went out we looked closer and found that we where catching these shrimp by the hundreds. Since these shrimp are so small we just dumped about 300 – 400 in the tank. It took two days and the seahorse had eaten them all.

When we went out a little deeper we found some more strange critters.

The seahorses did not mind the shrimp looked like a cartoon shrimp. We only found about 20-30 and they did not last long in the tank. We also caught about 20 sexy shrimp, but they too where snapped up by the seahorses. Next year when the weather warms up I will start a shrimp blog and catalogue all the shrimp we catch. It should be very interesting.