Petshrimp.com Discussion Forum

I went to the local backwaters of the Hudson river to collect some plant and driftwood...I also pick up some old decomposing tree branches from the bottom. This area is a combination of sand and silt and I collected everything near a colvert that brings clear water flowing to the area.I have the plants soaking in clean conditioned water and I put the drift wood in my swap water tank with live rock on top to start to water log it. I put the "bog wood" in there also which sank to the bottom.

After 2 days of soaking with my mollies and a few ghost shrimp I have in there I notice no ill effects to them so I took a 1 inch by 12 inch piece of wood I broke off and let it settle to the bottom of my RCS tank to see if they liked it. If they did I was going to put a more atractive piece in there for them.

What happened freaked me out...After I put it in the tank I got called upstairs to do some chores and when I came back an hour later there where 15 of my 20 RCS standing on the wood eating like crazy and I feed them blood worms and flake food every other day alternatting between the two.
Has anyone fed there shrimp like this before? It seams close to the leaf beds everyone has, including me but they where ravenous for what was on and in the wood..It had been in the water quite a while cuss it was honey combed from decomposition with plenty of places for microbs to breed.

So the question...was I stupid to try feeding them this "dirty wood" as I call it becuss it has unidentifed objects on and in it or....do shrimp know whats good for them??

Hi Beast

I have never used wood from a local river, but, I have used wood from my Wifes goldfish tank and they acted just the same way as you described.

This lasted for almost 2 days, they must have eaten all of the ??? and then went back to norm grazing.

John

I (until just recently) was having a really hard time growing any kind of aufwuchs for my shrimp. I placed a container full of dirty tank water with an ornament in it outside in direct sunlight for about four days. When I threw it in the tank, they went absloutely ballistic over it. Almost every single shrimp in the tank was crawling on this thing at the same time for hours.


By the following morning they were pretty much ignoring it again. It probably held much less than a piece of wood would have, since it's non-porous.

This is pretty typical behavior. As long as the wood had nothing bad in it, this would be their normal food.

I would cut back on the bloodworms. They will eat it, but decaying vegetation is what they really like.

Well then I better stock up while I can. It gets pretty frozen up here from november till march. Might get a couple 35 gallon garbage cans, 1 for treated water (wc) and 1 for old decomposing wood and run an airrater from the bottom of the log container. They munch till i figure thev'e eatten most of the food off it and then I'll toss in another piece in from the bog tank. Plus fish flake, and vacuum all the scraps from both.
Rick

with regards to the thread title, I think shrimp - and all wild, or at least not entirely dumbed-down domesticated, animals - do know 'what's best for them' in terms of food. At the very least, they recognize more natural sources of food such as the yummy critters living on the wild wood and find prepared or artificial foods less appealing. They're not actually thinking and plotting that, of course, but their genetic background with natural selection and whatnot must 'tell' them that this is good because it's what we've been eating for a long time. Newer sources of food are probably treated with trepidation because they're not sure if it's poisonous or otherwise undesirable, and natural selection would have favored the more cautious animals.

That's my $0.02 anyway

But I'm going to have to try the piece of wood in dirty water on the windowsill (combining Cactus and Beast's experiences). Thanks for the idea, guys!

Thanks for your $0.02 and let us know how long it takes for them to naw it clean...lol
Rick

There is another thread that covers using natural sea sponges. Soak them for a while in a sump or another tank to let the bios film build up, then move it to your shimp tank. make sure the sponges are naturally treated though. They should not have a chemical smell.

I got a few sponges algueing up (is that a word?) in my swamp/bog tank outside right now. There starting to green up pretty good.