Well my Malaya Shrimp are doing well and have grown considerably and are now quite active. Here is a couple photos as best as I can get with my camera. Sorry for the quality, but you can see both the Malaya and some of the Indian Zebra in with them.
Dealing with a hydra outbreak in this tank, but I guess it will run it's course and I don't want them in there if and when the Malaya begin releasing larva...
I have quite a mini eco system going on with lots of little critters, but the hydra just showed up in the last few days. I feed very little, but there are leaves in the tank feeding the organisms the hydra eat. I have some guppy fry temporarily in the tank to compete with the hydra for food and perhaps they will snack on a few as well. My blue ramshorn snails seem to eat them as well...
They have not colored up much yet, but are beginning to show body lines and some are also showing a stripe down the back.
Thanks for sharing the pictures of your shrimp with us. I have always liked the zebra shrimp, I guess it's the stripes. So is that last picture of baby zebras?
This is the best picture I could get of my Malayas....there should be four others in the tank somewhere
You can actually see a reflection of my camera in those pictures
And this is the best I could get of my Sri Lanka....
If they arent right against the glass I just cant get a decent picture of anything...
Theres quite a bit of algae in the tank....Im just afraid to do anything to the tank in fear that it might upset something...After they have some successful offspring and I put the babies in another tank I will remove a lot of the algae in this tank..
Yeah you cant really tell from the pictures....but its all over the bottom of the tank weaving itself through the grass.....
I removed a couple clumps of it today that were easy to get at without stirring up the substrate....but I dont want to do anything drastic untill I get my first batch of young
For some reason this tank has always had this probelm... I do water changes about 25% a week....(its a 10 gallon tank)...
And it gets around 12 hours of light a day (very rough estimate) ...the light gets turned on when I wake up and turned off when I go to bed....
I have other tanks that operate on the same criteria that never seem to accumulate this algae....the only difference being the size of the tanks and the types of plants in them...
I wonder if the grass in the tank is just poor competition for the algae ....
Both grow pretty slowly....(The picture with the Malaya is acutally the remains of a sponge that is kindof only being kept together with the algae that colonized it)....so its not like the tank explodes with growth with either the grass or the algae.......
I see you have rock(s) in the tank. Could you please tell me what type and if you collected it from the wild. I just want to use something that is safe in my tank, and apparently yours is .
The large rock is gneiss, a metamorphic rock from here in AZ and is quite stable and without toxic metals. It was collected in the mountains near my home.
I am currently looking for some rocks that are safe for shrimp tanks. Thanks for the information on your rocks. It must be nice to be able to get your rocks from a natural source .
While on the subject, I thought I'd pipe in with a question of my own. What do you guys know about slate? It is commonly used in aquariums but I don't think it's inert; does it raise PH, or have any other side effects?