My first tank!

[mag_pie319]

Hi everyone! Just wanted to share my little tank with you. I actually set it up over a year and a half ago with Mustafa's macroalgae and some lava rock, didn't touch it at all, and put the snail in 2 months ago. Due to moving, grad school, life, etc. I never got around to pulling the trigger and ordering shrimp until last week! I put them in the tank 2 days ago and they seem to be reddening up and swimming around, munching on all of the algae. I know that problems start to arise when people start feeding too much, so I want to avoid that as much as possible, but I'm not certain how long the amount of algae I have will last these guys. I saw in another post that once they are hungry, they are active and swim around, but others haven't had the need to feed in a few years. They seem to be super active now, but I think I'll manage to resist feeding until I observe they aren't consuming anything/there's no algae. I'll just have to wait and see! My foster kittens haven't noticed yet that there's finally movement in the tank, but I've been enjoying watching them--it might be better if they are less interested anyway

[Varanus]

I don't think there is an average activity level that indicates they need to be fed, its more about how strongly they respond when you put food in, how quickly they eat it all, etc. Even then its best not to feed more than once every few weeks.

In your case though your tank has been set up so long with nothing eating anything in it aside from a single snail (for just a couple months) that there should be a ton of food built up in the tank for the shrimp. So as you said, you may want to not feed anything until at least most of the visible algae on the glass and such is gone.

[mag_pie319]

Okay great, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing! Today they seem to be less active and hiding more, hopefully full/tired out from all of the eating. I also wonder if it's the temperature, it's 1-2 degrees cooler today (water is at 70* now) than the other two days so maybe that's why they're not as active.