5 Year Update

[Nexus6]

Hello fellow shrimpers. I just wanted to give an update to my opae ula tank which I started over 5 years ago.

I just recently did a 10% water change after not touching it for 5 years. I actually didn't do anything to the tank during the 5 years, no feeding, no cleaning, no water changes, etc only top offs with distilled water. I did however recently add a mini heater, but i doubt they really needed it, I might take it out. I also replaced my small bag of purigen a few weeks ago after having one in there for 5 years. The reason i did a small water change is because i suspected something wrong with the tank after seeing all the opaes looking a bit pale. I did a water test and found that i had a small amount of ammonia. I'm not sure if it was because i dropped a spirulina tablet into the water and left it in over the weekend or if my ammonia testing kit was just too old and showing the wrong level, its actually past expiration date by a few months.

I always have berried females and see larvae or baby opaes in the tank, i rarely see dead ones and when i do, they are usually eaten and gone by the next day. I've never had really super red opaes, they were either semi red or pink. About a few years ago, I did notice a strange thick hairlike green algae growing on the walls of the tank. Its not like the little hairy string algae i had when i first started the tank. I decided to just leave it be. The aragonite on the left have filled in with detritus, poop and whatever else there is. Before it was filled up with this stuff, I used to see tiny baby opae moving around in there and was worried they wouldnt find their way out. My salinity level is at 1.015, it was at 1.025 before i did the water change. I find that 1.015 is the perfect level. Anyways, Here's what it currently looks like.

oh and i forgot to mention, my chaeto is green and healthy, it went through different phases throughout the year almost dieing out and now its stable and healthy.

[Dch48]

1.025 is full strength seawater so it's probably good that you reduced that. My shrimp rarely get fully red either. Maybe it's the light. I have noticed on a few occasions that before I turn the light on, some of my shrimp are actually a deep red. After the light is turned on, they gradually fade.

[Varanus]

It is a bit odd how uniformly pale they are, my tank has a few hundred shrimp in it and they've always ranged from pinkish to fairly deep red with only a few pale individuals (excepting times of stress like me moving around things in the tank, causing them all to turn pale for a few hours) and that's with their light on 12 hours a day. The fact that you got so much plant/algae growth for five years without feeding suggests your tank may have started with more than ideal levels of nutrients, which I hypothesize might have effected the shrimp's colors. Perhaps the strength of the salinity was putting stress on them too?

I notice you don't seem to have any snails. If so then perhaps you could get some? The burrowing snails Mustafa sells will be able to get to and clean up excess waste/nutrients that are under the substrate (as these shrimp don't really dig much at all for food), which could improve overall conditions in the tank.

[Mustafa]

Thanks for the update, Nexus! I agree with Varanus. You probably started out with tons of nutrients in your tank for algae growth to be that heavy over such a long period of time. The coloration definitely depends on environmental conditions. My experience has been also that in low nutrients tanks the shrimp are simply colored better over time. The snails Varanus mentioned will help release the nutrients in the substrate (including the shrimp crap that has accumulated over the years) back into the water so that the macroalgae and other algae can utilize it. That's one of the main reasons I recommend having burrowing snails actually, in addition to them being a great indicator for overfeeding if you start seeing a ton of them everywhere all the time (even during the day).