Like many others I unknowingly purchased an ecosphere for my office about 4 years ago. I started with 4 shrimp and now I have 2 left (4 years seems pretty good though considering). I happened upon an Amazon review that explained how terrible these things are so I started doing some research. I spent several weeks reading other people's experiences here. I set up my nano tank following Mustafa's directions. I have a 2.5 gallon jar with Carib Sea Crushed Coral as substrate. I used Instant Ocean and have been measuring salinity with a refractometer, so far have been between 1.010 and 1.012. I also have a rock and two plastic plants I found at Petsmart. I ordered Mustafa's snails and macroalgae and added them a few days after setting up my tank. I have an office LED light that I have on every 12 hours or so. I have not yet found a timer that actually works so I've been turning it off and on manually so its not always exactly 12 hours. I am not using a heater and they are not in direct sunlight.
At this point the snails and marcoalgae have been in the tank for 4 weeks. I am seeing some definite biofilm but no other growth, brown, green or otherwise. I received 11 snails from Mustafa, one was definitely DOA because he never moved from the marcoalgae. The rest seem to have disappeared. I saw one definitely alive and two that were definitely empty shells but I can't find any of the others. There are a lot of places for them to hide in my tank between the substrate, two plants and large rock but I'm a bit worried now and don't want to add my shrimp until I'm sure the environment is ok for them since I only have two left. I added a drop of Prime last weekend just in case.
My questions are: should I be seeing more algae growth? How do I promote this? Should I be concerned that I can't find any of the snails?
I'm very newbie myself. I just started my tank back on Nov 5th. About 12 days later I started seeing a bunch of bio-film on the water surface of my 20g tank. I got the snails and macro-algae from Mustafa in the tank by Nov 30th. I have only been able to spot a snail here or there since off and on. But the majority of them I have not seen. By December 8th, I noticed the surface bio-film which was white before started showing signs of green, so I believe that was the start of seeing some algae growth on the surface of the water. And by Dec 16th, I'm seeing a lot more algae growth on the surface of the water along with bio-film the spread of the brown algae (diatoms) on the glass as well as covering a lot of the surface gravel/fake plants. 2 of the tiny coral gravel have algae growth on them. Mustafa said he thinks my tank is ready now, but I will probably wait a little bit longer to see more of the green algae on the coral/rocks and the decline of diatoms.
I did put several bits of fish food when I initially started my cycling process. I measured the ammonia, nitrate, nitrite, pH off and on, but not on a daily basis. I saw low levels of ammonia, but was never able to get any reading for nitrate/nitrite, but maybe I missed the conversion process since I didn't take readings every day.
I forgot to mention, I also have a heater in my tank. During the initial 2 or 3 weeks, I had the heater set at a high temperature.. around 78-80 degrees. I figured the higher temperature would be more conducive to the bacteria/bio-film growth. After that time, I lowered the temperature to about 73 degrees.
My tank is at 69.2 now I'm starting to wonder if I should heat it up in there. I'm glad there's another ecosphere liberator in these parts! Yay shrimp!
So how's your little jar doing babytulip? Any updates? The snails are burrowing snails that are also nocturnal, so you won't see too many of them at any given time until they reproduce.
InSoOverMyHead...your temp is perfectly fine. No need to heat the container/tank.
Hi, sorry for the delayed reply. I just added 10 shrimp from you (Mustafa) this weekend and managed to rescue my last surviving shrimp from my ecosphere. Unfortunately I lost one while waiting for the tank to cycle (I probably waited longer then absolutely necessary). They seem to be doing well, the new shrimp are very clear compared to my ecosphere shrimp, who is bright red, but believe I read that is normal. I'm seeing more algae growth now on the fake plants and rocks in my jar, the shrimp really seem to like the purple plants. I usually see 6-7 of them just hanging out there. So far so good, hopefully I was concerned for no reason!
One question, when I should I feed them? Should I go ahead put some in there or wait a month for the first feeding? I have some frozen food that was recommended to me by an exotic fish store. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Better, worse or the same as wafer/flakes?
Given you have visible algae I would say waiting a month to feed should be fine. As for what to feed, most any small pellet or flake food should be fine, you just have to keep in mind how tiny their mouths are and that they need to be able to graze off small bits from a given piece of food. On that note whether the frozen food is good for them or not may depend on what it is made of, so what is it?
Also keep in mind that you need to feed very little when you do feed, no more than what it takes them a few hours to consume.
Don't feed, there is plenty for them to eat in your tank. The coloration of shrimp in a newly established tank will always be less intense. However, that will change over time although there will always be individual variations. Interestingly enough the less you feed the more colorful they get over time. I have multiple similarly sized containers on my kitchen table that haven't been fed for over 4 months and the shrimp in there are bright red. Don't feed frozen food...fish/pet store employees have literally *no* idea what they're talking about when it comes to Supershrimp, or shrimp in general. If you meet one that actually informed him/herself you'll be lucky, but I wouldn't count on it.
