Opae ula enjoying the current?

[Mech]

I've had nitrites creep up in one of my tanks and have been doing a few water changes to bring it lower, it was well below 0.25 but I wanted it at zero and all is well now.

I noticed when I was pouring the fresh water in a lot of the shrimps came to the area of the tank the water was slowly flowing into and they seemed to be swimming into it?

I have just added a HOB filter so I can have some media in the tank, well I have set it up so it has a small current of water that comes down from the surface over a baffle and they are always swimming into it. This is a tiny section of the tank and it's a large tank so they can stay away if they wish but they seem to enjoy it along with the water changes.

Has anyone else noticed this?

[mcdaney]

Haha they're pretty funny creatures
Take a video of this "phenomenon" Mech!

[tooth]

When I top off my tank, I've noticed a few of the larger females come over for a swim, or at least to see what's going on. The smaller shrimp, especially the larvae, just get pushed around.

[JasonG3333]

Generally, I would say that the shrimp do NOT prefer any water disturbance despite what you described. That's part of the reason why having no filter or air stone is recommended for these guys. Also, the anchialine pools that are their natural environment are very still. Every time anyone tops off their tank after some evaporation, though, the water is going to be disturbed. My shrimp do the exact same thing every time I'm topping off - a few will attempt to swim right into the water coming in. But, seemingly all of my shrimp go nuts, swimming frantically around the tank for quite a while after I'm done. So, my guess would be that, although it may appear they are enjoying or are curious about the water flow when they swim into it like that, they overall are disturbed a bit / not happy by the moving water.

[Varanus]

Generally, I would say that the shrimp do NOT prefer any water disturbance despite what you described. That's part of the reason why having no filter or air stone is recommended for these guys. Also, the anchialine pools that are their natural environment are very still. Every time anyone tops off their tank after some evaporation, though, the water is going to be disturbed. My shrimp do the exact same thing every time I'm topping off - a few will attempt to swim right into the water coming in. But, seemingly all of my shrimp go nuts, swimming frantically around the tank for quite a while after I'm done. So, my guess would be that, although it may appear they are enjoying or are curious about the water flow when they swim into it like that, they overall are disturbed a bit / not happy by the moving water.

That's been my experience. I haven't added water yet as the evaporation has been very slow (got the tank pretty much completed covered), but just putting a tool in to move some algae around has proved enough to get the shrimp swimming around frantically for hours as if in a panic. Someone did post a video though of supershrimp swimming right into a tube with flowing water as if it were a underwater slide and then seemingly purposefully repeating the action, quite different from the random panic I see in mine when it comes to water movement. Perhaps the type of water movement matters?

[Mustafa]

I wouldn't recommend any water movement. As a nice side effect of having no water movement you'll also have slower evaporation and *no* salt creep. Salt creep sucks.