Hoping for some advice on cleaning or creating new tank

[Amysan]

Hello! I am new here but have had Opae Ula for about four years now. A little background info before I get into my question:

I'm from Hawaii and originally got my shrimp from a store at a mall. I transported them with me shortly after purchasing them to the east coast for college, and kept them in a jar ever since. I started with seven, and unfortunately am down to three these days. In the future I'll definitely be buying from this website to be sure I'm getting captive bred shrimp, since I'm moving to the west coast soon and want to keep the shrimp/get more. But that's not my issue for today!

Anyway, my little jar is about 1/2 gal, and it's gotten quite dirty over the years. I didn't know you were supposed to top it off with distilled water until today, so my poor shrimpies were living in about 2/3 the amount of water they started in. I put in some distilled water today, but the area of glass that didn't have water for a couple years is dirty. I also added a single fish flake food because I got scared I was starving them and they were wasting away slowly because they're so resilient. Today before researching anything, I got a new, larger jar (3/4 gal) and started the process to cycle it and get it ready to to transfer the shrimp, but then researched a bunch and am pausing any actions I was planning on taking. I thought I might consult here before doing anything too rash. Do you folks think it's better to just clean the existing enclosure? And how should I do that? Will the shrimps eat off the area and clean it themselves (therefore I would just leave it alone)? Or would it be ok to transfer the substrate and decorations, and simply pour the existing water and shrimp into the new jar (after cleaning it with distilled water of course)?

Thanks for helping me out and reading this long post!

[dolfanjack]

I use a cheap toothbrush to clean my jar glass. With only three shrimp it should be no problem going up in tank size, that's really up to you. You should have enough good bacteria in the substrate and decorations to have an instint cycle. Jack

[Amysan]

Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it!