My journey started out last year with Ecosphere pods from Groupon. I busted those guys out after they started dying off since I read on sites like this how awful those things were. I set those guys up in a one gallon tank in my living room. I decided to then set up another tank in my office. I found a guy selling shrimp for a really low price and he also had algae covered rock and pre-cycled water. I thought "Oh, great way to get another gallon tank setup right away". Boy was I wrong. The seller shipped a pound of rocks, a gallon of water, and 30 shrimp in one box instead of in separate boxes like his website said. He sent the package out during the big ice storm earlier this year so it was delayed for days. When it finally arrived the box was soaked. The post office was ticked off at me because the package had been leaking all over the post office and their trucks. They ended up wrapping the box in plastic and putting it in one of those corrugated carrying boxes they have. They asked if I wanted to refuse the shipment but I didn't know how much water had leaked out so I decided to take the package in case the shrimp had managed to survive. It was pretty nasty inside that box...The gallon of water turned into about half a cup of water...I'm not exaggerating. There were dead shrimp everywhere. Some were crushed from the pound of rocks that was in a bag next to them and others were just dead from lack of water. At first I thought only 4 survived but I poured all of them into a cup with fresh brackish water that I just mixed a few days before. The next day, I think around 20 of them were alive somehow. I really have no idea how they survived since some of them were completely without water for who knows how long. Since the water was all gone I had to start this tank with a gallon of freshly mixed brackish water...no cycling whatsoever. Now I did buy chateo and snails from Mustafa but everything was thrown into the tank on the same day. I figured the shrimp would die a few days later from shock so I went ahead and purchased 30 more shrimp from another dealer. They arrived perfectly. By the time I got these shrimp the tank had been up for several weeks, no deaths. I ended up splitting these shrimp between both my tanks.
This was all back in Feb of this year! From what I’ve read on here this is pretty unusual. The water was not cycled, at all. There are 35-40 shrimp all in a gallon container which I’ve read is fine if it happens naturally but that you shouldn’t just dump a bunch in all at once since it’s likely to overload the system. And the tank is barely over 90 days old. Crazy stuff but I guess it shows how super these little guys are.
I'm sure it's not recommended to setup a fresh tank like I did but I had no choice and it was the only way I could even attempt to salvage what this other dealer did. But if berried female means healthy tank then it looks like I got lucky!
