My new - Halocaridina rubra Setup

[RMDelete]

Hi everyone! I joined this board about a year ago and did some quick reading. I have a big tendency to get distracted aaaand due to my nature I happened to get distracted. I'd like to again thank everyone who initially welcomed me to the boards and then apologize to all I left hanging with no response. I have now returned to my Opae Ula research.

I started with 20 Opae Ula and lost 1 due to what I call a "heart attack" I think he got spooked and died, then I fed the corpse to my mandarin. Other than that the remaining 19 have survived. No breeding, I was silly and did not do any research so I would just eye my setup and wonder why my population was not increasing... well finally I realized my salinity was probably too low. I upped my salinity from 1.005 to 1.014 or something, I noticed about six molts. I decided to upgrade my 2.5 to a 5 gal so I purchased all crushed black lava gravel, and 1 nice sized lava rock and transferred all the original aquarium pieces from my 2.5 to my 5 gal (minus all the annoying brackish snails that went ape sh*t crazy and flooded the aquarium with babies) no more stupid snails.

I have a tiny filter running with a foam sponge and 1 onion plant. I tried to see if I could acclimate some colts buuuut clearly they did not agree with my experiment so I removed them, I did manage to acclimate some Astrina (sp) stars to the brackish conditions and they are ok... barely day 4 for them, I transferred them as an alternative to control algae. Hopefully the stars survive.

Sooo attached is a picture of my new setup. I temporarily placed a blue paper behind the aquarium to block the view out that would show my not so pretty kitchen I look forward to continuing research.

[Mustafa]

Take out the onion plants and the moss...they are just going to rot away and pollute the water. You can't have any plants at that salinity. Algae are good enough as far as plants go. And...you don't really need sea starts to "control" the algae either. Your shrimp will feed on the algae. And dump the filter...not needed and counterproductive. And.....please do some reading and searching on this forum. I have said all of these things and much much more in various posts before. It's really worth it. Good luck!

[RMDelete]

Hey there, I am back... sorry I pretty much posted and vanished into thin air (online that is) shortly after I posted this picture I read that plants were a no-no and did get rid of the onion plant. Sooo yeah I am back to do some reading -_- because it's been a pretty long time, I still have all my shrimp buuuut no new additions, so I am going to follow your advice and read a little more (I have sooo much reading to do already so it may take me a while to get around to all the subjects) do you think it would be a bad idea to re-do my setup? I apparently have some hitch hiking bad snails that breed like crazy so I was going to remove all my shrimp and start with fresh substrate and maybe try to kill anything on the rock by boiling it... of course I am going to do a little reading before I decide to do this 100%

I was just at Aquatic Warehouse today when one of the guys reminded me of this forum and so I decided to come back and do more reading. I really do need to learn more I've had the same population of Opae Ula for about nearly 3 years now and still no babies.... it's pretty strange... and very discouraging :\

[RMDelete]

oooookay.... so I decided to clean the aquarium up first in order to remove the filter and other NON-shrimp paraphernalia and start off with fresh lava gravel and clean lava rock aaaaand.... looks like they DID indeed breed... I believe I had 19 in there when I last posted and right now I counted 23 so that's 4 more than before. I'll post an update when I am done. I also purchased a sponge filter since I read somewhere that those were much better preferred than the regular filters and don't cause much problems (although I also hear that they are not needed in several places)

[RMDelete]

Update! I apparently just suck at raising baby shrimp.

I originally had a filter turn on for 15 minute periods every 3 hours and rarely fed or turned on my lights due to fear of algae... well I changed this right before I left for a trip to hawaii I decided to only have my filter turn one ONCE over a 24hr period (for 15 minutes) and fed them before leaving and when I returned I looked and discovered my first Opae Ula larvae!!! I wanted to share him with everyone here I ran to get my camera but by the time I returned with my camera he had swam far away from the front of the setup (he was really close at first) so please forgive the horrible fuzziness..







sooo cute! I love him! Hopefully they start breeding like crazy now I've been missing out for the past 3+ years!