Aquarium gravel bad for supershrimp?

[shmohney]

I'm setting up a new 1.5 gallon tank and plan to order some shrimp after it gets settled. I put some Top Fin Aquarium Gravel in it, colored black, because I thought it would make a nice contrast to the shrimp color. But I've read several posts from people who had problems with shrimp dying, and they suspected it was their aquarium gravel. I know Mustafa doesn't recommend using gravel, but is it normally harmful? Should I take it out and maybe even start again with some new water to be on the safe side?

[brianc]

I am also interested in this. Are any substrates safe? I was going to get some sort of natural PH neutral black substrate and mix it with crushed coral.

[AndyH]

I've never had a supershrimp tank before. Or even a fish tank... But I've had a little 1/3 gallon sea monkey tank for about a month now. Just last night I got done taking out all that stupid gravel I had in there and replacing it with sand. The sea monkeys had been slipping through the spaces in the gravel and then getting stuck. It took out half my population and I had to make a change before it took out the rest. Now I'm not sure how the supershrimp compare in size to the sea monkeys but I think for my new supershrimp tank that I'm putting together, I'm going to keep it on the safe side and avoid gravel. I'm just going to use some black sand size substrate with them too.

[Mustafa]

I'm setting up a new 1.5 gallon tank and plan to order some shrimp after it gets settled. I put some Top Fin Aquarium Gravel in it, colored black, because I thought it would make a nice contrast to the shrimp color. But I've read several posts from people who had problems with shrimp dying, and they suspected it was their aquarium gravel. I know Mustafa doesn't recommend using gravel, but is it normally harmful? Should I take it out and maybe even start again with some new water to be on the safe side?

---Wow...wow...wow...wait a minute...I don't remember ever stating that I don't recommend aquarium gravel. In fact, on the "setup" page for the Supershrimp I state that substrate choice is not important...gravel, sand, no substrate...doesn't matter at all. As I have stated in many other posts, most issues do not stem from the wrong choice of substrate, but from water parameter/overfeeding related problems. Since, as humans, we eat several times a day, and food is so central to our lives, we tend to think that all animals need food regularly. So, people naturally overfeed and don't even notice. Then, when things go wrong, they try to find reasons *other* than overfeeding. Overfeeding is the No. 1 cause of problems in aquaria...no matter if they are Supershrimp tanks, freshwater shrimp tanks or tanks with fish in them. Some animals are more hardy, others less, but I have *never* had problems in decades of fish or shrimp keeping that could be traced down to something bad "leaching" from the substrate. And every time someone tells me that they have had substrate issues, I quickly find out the real reason for their troubles after asking some pointed questions.

[shmohney]

Whoa, sorry, Mustafa, for mis-stating your thoughts on gravel.......! Anyway, in the absence of an immediate answer, I got a water chem testing kit and found that my distilled water pH was a little on the low side. Not far, but a little lower than the recommendations I'd seen here. So I switched to some crushed coral (a little coarser than I wanted, but it's all I could find). And I put a bunch of small limestone rocks in one corner to provide potential breeding habitat. The pH is still a little low, so I guess it's off to the aquarium store again for something to bring it up a bit more. Thanks for everybody's thoughts on this. I recently received some Terebia snails and Chaetomorpha from Mustafa, and added them to the tank in hopes that they would help seed the tank with algae for when I get some shrimp. So I'm waiting for algae to grow, and for warmer shipping weather too, just to be on the safe side.

[Mustafa]

No problem, misunderstandings happen at times. If I were you I would just leave your tank alone now. Don't worry about pH and what not. If you used a commercial reef salt mix (as recommended by me), then your pH will be perfectly fine..no matter what you measure right after setup (consider measuring errors and inadequate "test strips" as the culprit of false "low pH" readings). And don't worry about the pH of distilled water...once you mix in the salt mix, everything turns out just perfectly fine as the salt mix regulates all that. So...don't go to the fish store to buy anything at all to mess with the pH. It really is as simple as what the Supershrimp information pages state. Set the tank up according to the information given there and forget about it. Don't mess with it *at all.* It's really that simple.

[LeShrimp]

I use some sand for mine the shrimp don't seem to be too picky about this gravel should be fine but make sure that you don't accidently get some rock on the shrimp because you could hurt their fragile limbs.