New Shrimp Breeder Tank

wood · Post by **wood** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 6:00 pm

I only had one shrimp tank before, a 10 gallon planted tank.

I got this new 10 gallon shrimp tank up and running. An additional 10 gallon is about to be set up as well, making 3 shrimp breeding tanks. The two new ones are basically shrimp breeder tanks only, no plants besides moss and ferns.

The setup is a 10 Gallon tank. 3M ColorQuartz Sand "Cayman" color T-grade. This sand is actually quartz, so it is totally inert and will not do anything to your water parameters. I picked that color because it is different from the black and white which is the norm. It will be interesting to see how the shrimp look in there. I plan on adding Snowball and another kind, not sure yet.

The Temperature is 79F, lighting is (2) 14watt 6500k CF spiral bulbs. Filtration is an AquaClear 50 with a foam pad, bag of purigen, and the old bag of matrix from the old 10 gallon. The used matrix bag should definitely help quickly cycle the tank. I just put a new matrix bag in the old 10 gallon. PH is right now at 7.6, but I plan to drop that using a tiny bit of peat.

Anyhow, lemme know what you think. And yes, there will be a sponge put over the intake of the filter. I just haven't put it yet because there are no shrimp and I wanted to get the filter on full flow to assist the cycling.

badflash · Post by **badflash** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 6:05 pm

You'll need to keep an eye on the pH and hardness with nothing to buffer the water, but other than that it looks pretty good. Putting a sponge filter over your HOB (looks like an aquaclear- good!) works well, but needs cleaning every week. Flow gets cut WAY down.

Get a couple of big chunks of coral in there if you want hard water shrimp. Looks good and helps with the pH and hardness.

ToddnBecka · Post by **ToddnBecka** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:13 pm

You can use a handful of crushed coral in the hob to buffer the pH if you don't have any chunks handy. Of course, it also depends on what species of shrimp you plan to keep in the tank...

Neonshrimp · Post by **Neonshrimp** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 8:15 pm

And yes, there will be a sponge put over the intake of the filter.

Looks like you have things in motion and are cycling the tank. If used right the moss and fern will look great! I am interested to see how the snowball shrimp will look on the light blue substrate

Hope it goes well for you and your shrimp

.

wood · Post by **wood** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 6:36 am

thanks guys.

Yea as far as buffering and ph I am going to use Seachem Neutral Regulator. I will keep everyone posted on how it goes.

-Ryan

badflash · Post by **badflash** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 7:41 am

wood wrote: Yea as far as buffering and ph I am going to use Seachem Neutral Regulator.

DON"T DO IT!!!!!

Nearly ALL buffers and regulators are phosphate based. You will get NO BABIES if you do. Phosphate are shrimp birth control, and a slow death for them. If you have already used it, dump your tank, rinse well & start over.

They also don't give you stable control of your pH.

Add a harndfull of crushed coral under the area of highest flow in your tank.

If you water is naturally soft, you can harden it with R/O right or Electro-Right.

RCSGuy · Post by **RCSGuy** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 1:50 pm

Looks like a great start

I hope you haven't used that buffer yet though ...

wood · Post by **wood** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 5:59 pm

badflash wrote:
wood wrote: Yea as far as buffering and ph I am going to use Seachem Neutral Regulator.
DON"T DO IT!!!!!

Nearly ALL buffers and regulators are phosphate based. You will get NO BABIES if you do. Phosphate are shrimp birth control, and a slow death for them. If you have already used it, dump your tank, rinse well & start over.

They also don't give you stable control of your pH.

Add a harndfull of crushed coral under the area of highest flow in your tank.

If you water is naturally soft, you can harden it with R/O right or Electro-Right.

Hmm. I have actually put a little bit of peat instead of using Equilibrium. I will slowly raise the amount of peat until I reach the point I want.

It's a funny thing that you mention that because I dose a TON of phosphate in my other 10 gallon tank and the RCS breed like crazy. I have babies all over the places. The tank is very heavily planted and I dose enough KH2PO4 as recommended for a 30 gallon. I have not seen any ills effects to be very honest.

I will not be using Equilibrium though in this new tank. Peat is going to be my method for now. Please let me know though if Peat is also a bad thing

-Ryan

Neonshrimp · Post by **Neonshrimp** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 6:05 pm

I will not be using Equilibrium though in this new tank. Peat is going to be my method for now. Please let me know though if Peat is also a bad thing

-Ryan

You can actually compare the two tanks and let us know if there are any differences and if so what they are

I think it depends on what type/form of Peat you use. Search "Peat" because there has been discussions about it before

badflash · Post by **badflash** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 6:44 pm

Why would you be using peat in a cherry shrimp tank, or did I mis-read?

My experience with phosphates and nitrates is that it is essential to keep both below 5 ppm. When I first started shrimping I used neutral regulator. My shrimp would never berry up and pregnant females purchased elsewhere would drop their eggs, or lose their saddle. I also got over run with black beard algae. Once I reduced the phosphates to <5 ppm I got lots of babies.

Others too have reported success with phosphates, but they suddenly stopped posting. I think that is because the phosphate caught up with them. Most people that use ferts over time suddenly report that their shrimp are dying and "everything is fine, what could be wrong".

wood · Post by **wood** » Thu Mar 15, 2007 7:47 pm

badflash wrote:Why would you be using peat in a cherry shrimp tank, or did I mis-read?

My experience with phosphates and nitrates is that it is essential to keep both below 5 ppm. When I first started shrimping I used neutral regulator. My shrimp would never berry up and pregnant females purchased elsewhere would drop their eggs, or lose their saddle. I also got over run with black beard algae. Once I reduced the phosphates to <5 ppm I got lots of babies.

Others too have reported success with phosphates, but they suddenly stopped posting. I think that is because the phosphate caught up with them. Most people that use ferts over time suddenly report that their shrimp are dying and "everything is fine, what could be wrong".

No I do not use peat in my RCS tank. My RCS tank is another 10 gallon heavily planted tank. It has driftwood in it and CO2 is used as well. The PH is about 6.0 now... They breed fine, there are lots of babies, and the females are always pregnant.

Do you do planted tanks?

-Ryan

badflash · Post by **badflash** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 4:33 am

My tanks have lots of plants, but not planted. I have Riccia, Java Moss, Java Fern and various duckweeds. I use no ferts at all they they grow lush & green. When I use ferts (flourish) last year the shrimp died, so I stopped. It didn't seem to help the plants and hurt the shrimp.

wood · Post by **wood** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 8:10 am

badflash wrote:My tanks have lots of plants, but not planted. I have Riccia, Java Moss, Java Fern and various duckweeds. I use no ferts at all they they grow lush & green. When I use ferts (flourish) last year the shrimp died, so I stopped. It didn't seem to help the plants and hurt the shrimp.

Flourish contains Copper which probably didn't help.

Dosing ferts with those plants will definitely cause algae, especially because you probably aren't using CO2. Phosphates will not cause shrimp deaths, Nitrates will though. That is why I do not dose KNO3 but I do dose everything else.

In this new shrimp tank I will not be dosing any ferts because the moss and java ferns will so just fine without them. They are very low maintenance plants. The high maintenance plants that I have in my other 10 gallon tank, the one with RCS and Tigers has some very particular plants in it that require a lot of CO2, light, and ferts.

Dosing ferts properly will not harm your shrimp at all. Think about it, there is plenty of nutrients in their natural habitats.

-Ryan

badflash · Post by **badflash** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 8:25 am

Flourish at the recommended dosage does not have enough copper to harm shrimp (0.0001%) unless you went nuts with the dosing and did not do water changes.

Nitrates up to 50 ppm also don't kill shrimp, but it isn't great for them. Nitrate/phosphae being imbalanced will cause BBA, but if you get the phosphate to match a high nitrate level, the shrimp will stop reproducing, at least in my tanks.

I don't dose CO2. That could have some effect. I know a woman in Scandinavia that keeps beautifull CRS and claims to have 5 ppm nitrate/phosphate and runs CO2.

I've found that for apple snails, shrimp and crays, which are my focus, that slow growing plants that require no care like java moss and java fern give me the best bang for the effort.

Post by **Mustafa** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 8:29 am

wood wrote: Dosing ferts properly will not harm your shrimp at all. Think about it, there is plenty of nutrients in their natural habitats.

-Ryan

That's a fallacious assumption. Most *undisturbed* aquatic habitats out there have negligible amounts of nitrate or phosphate. You would not be able to measure anything at all with the usual hobby test kits. That does not mean that shrimp cannot take much higher amounts of nitrates and phosphates than what naturally occurs in their habitats.

Also, this fallacious assumption is based on the fact that many plants kept in the hobby won't grow well, or at all, without additional fertilization and CO2 additions. What people don't know, or tend to forget, is that many of these difficult plants grow emersed in their natural habitats. They are basically bog/swamp plants. They get plenty of nutrients from the soil (as they grow on land most of the year and the nutrients don't get washed away as in aquatic habitats) and their CO2 comes from the air...and there is plenty of it. CO2 levels in water are always much, much lower than in the air as water cannot possibly dissolve as much CO2 as the air can hold.

Now...when people try to permanently "drown"

these plants, the plants don't like it one bit, unless you make their aquatic habitat as close to their normal, non-aquatic land habitat as possible...i.e. give them CO2 and "drown" them with nutrients and hope that those nutrients find their way to the roots.

*Real* aquatic plants likc Elodea sp. and Najas sp., for example, don't have such problems.

In any case, I don't want to go off-topic here (and please, let's not turn this into a plant discussion), but the point is what's stated already in the first sentence of this post. It's never a good idea to make blanket statements, and present them as facts, without making sure that they are actually correct. So, let's all be careful about such things when posting in the future.