journal Howard's Shrimp Tank

[Howard18]

Hello all,

 

I'm new here in the forum, having just registered and made an introduction yesterday.

 

As promised, here are some current photos of my tank. I intend to keep a journal to document the growth and expansion of my blue velvet colony.

 

My current tank parameters are:

 

PH: 7.4 - I have tried to lower this to 7.2 with PH down but a day after seemingly successfully lowering the PH it shoots back up

Water: Tap water treated with Seachem Prime

Temperture: ~25°C

Ammonia: 0ppm - I was struggling with high ammonia a few weeks ago but there was nothing in the tank except for some shrimp snowflakes (I left it in for a week, maybe that's why?). Interested to know if this happens to others here?

Nititrite: 0ppm

Nitrate: 10ppm

KH: 100ppm

GH: 100ppm

 

Tank and Equipment:

- Upgraded to Fluval Edge 46L lighting (42 LEDs instead of 21)

- AquaOne 25w heater

- Sochting Oxydator Mini

- Eden 501 cannister filter with an extra bag of carbon (replaced HOB filter that came with the tank)

- Aquael 3w UV sterilizer

 

Fauna:

- 13 Blue Velvet Shrimps

- 1 Riffle Shrimp

 

Flora:

- Hairgrass (Elocharis Acicularis)

- Flame Moss (Taxiphyllum sp.)

- Phoenix Moss (Fissidens Fontanus)

 

Without further ado, some photos of my tank:

 

This is the front view of my tank:

 

From the top down:

 

Some of my blue velvets in the tank:

 

 

My setup:

 

Thank you for looking and feel free to leave comments!

 

Best regards,

Howard

[revolutionhope]

hey mate your setup looks wonderful! I can offer a little advice about your pH situation.

you must have some alkalinity (carbonate hardness) in your tank to cause the pH to bounce back up when you add pH down. you might want to invest in a gh / kh test kit to help you get your head around what is happening.

if you look in the water parameters section of this forum and check the "stickies" i think there is some good advice there from memory.

pH bouncing down/up is bad news from fish and especially shrimps as shrimps love stability (along with zero ammonia nitrites and nitrates) above all else!

if you want to naturally cause your pH to drift lower then you could add more driftwood, indian almond leaves perhaps, or even add a little peatmoss to your canister.

I wouldn't worry about the pH too much in the short term. the worst thing you can do for pH is to cause it to fluctuate up and down constantly !

hope ive been helpful. ps your tank looks great I love it! :-) i have blue velvets too and love them. im keen to have riffles one day too!

good luck and im sure other more experienced folks here will have better advice to offer than I do!

love n peace

will

[fishmosy]

Great tank Howard.

As Will has said, your GH and KH are quite high and will cause your pH to increase again after you have dosed with pH down. Stability is key.

How do you like your riffle shrimp? Do you know whether its male or female? Males are small (less than approx. 2.5 - 3 cm) and then turn into females.

[Howard18]

Hi Will and Fishmosy, thanks for the advice and compliments, I'll check it out this weekend and maybe get a softener. I've read and heard from sources that as long as PH stays stable the shrimps should be fine inside. I've heard of using alder cones and leaves to lower PH but the tannins are putting me off.

 

You've definitely got to try riffle shrimps if you have the chance, Will. I've got to say that the riffle is the most interesting shrimp I've kept, given that I've kept only Red, Yellow and Back Cherries in the past. Whenever I do a water change it swims around the whole tank, sometimes so close to the opening that it seems like it's going to jump out. Other times it sticks around places that have high flow to feed. Interestingly, it does not feed near the floating dome that I specifically set up for it. It was really shy in the beginning but now it feels as if it owns the tank and plays around in the ceramic cubes more than the blue velvets.

 

As far as gender is concerned I think it is still a male but it being the only riffle I think it'll grow into a female very soon!

 

Here's a shot of the Riffle and where he usually feeds:

 

One of my two berried shrimps:

 

As you can see they are messy eaters!

 

I'm thinking of replacing the ceramic tubes for something smaller and have ordered some Minitem Tube S. It'll be a fun little project!

 

Cheers,

Howard

[revolutionhope]

Hey howard, riffles do seem fun for sure !! ive heard from other people that they are great to watch and quite different from cherries and crystal shrimp in theit behaviour ! have you had your riffles breeding for you yet?

im yet to try the product seachem purigen or the cheaper alternative

macropore which i only just purchased recently but I might have heard people say that it removes the colour that tannins give aquarium water? you might like to look into it if you haven't heard of it before. ive just bought some myself; but mainly for a different reason than keeping the water clear and the reason I got it is to help control nitrates which I had a problem with previously :-)

p.s. how do you do your water changes? i dont have a clue about riffles but I only ask about your WC because i know that some shrimp types will swim around a lot after water changes because they are stressed by the sudden change in conditions. of course if its only the males that are swimming around everywhere then love is in the air!! ;-)

love n peace

will

[Howard18]

Hi Will,

 

I only have the one riffle but in the future I would like to. I've heard the juvies are a bit harder to raise compared to the neocaridinas and caridinas so I might go the route of quality CRS's before I venture into riffles. They are plenty interesting though and are great additions to a shrimp tank. I'll have to look up Seachem's Purigen and see if it does what it says. Nothing like a happy colony of shrimps 

 

I do weekly 10-15% water changes using treated tap water with neutral PH and plan on doing so until it gets to 7.2 but seeing as it might be an alkalinity related issue I might pull back on reducing PH this way and causing unnecessary spikes. Love was/is still in the air, with my 4th berried blue velvet spotted this morning. She was rearranging her eggs, presumably just finished mating.

 

On a side note, I'm thinking of replacing the Sochting Oxydator with an airpump (AquaLighter aPump) connected to a CO2 diffuser. Wonder how that would work out as getting H2O2 at the right percentage seems like a bit of a hassle.

 

Best regards,

Howard

[Howard18]

I had a look at the shrimp tank today and was dismayed to find one of my blue velvet dead but another one pregnant, making this the 5th berried in my tank. The shrimp was not dead for long I think because the body was still transparent blue and soft to the touch (maybe died after moulting? other moulted ones seem fine though). I did a 25% water change just to be safe and tested the old tank water. Ammonia and nitrites are at 0ppm, nitrates at 20ppm. I left some shrimp crack in there for about 8 hours during the last feeding, could this have contributed to the increased nitrate? The last nitrate reading was 5-10ppm.

 

I noticed algae has begun to grow on my existing ceramic tubes and blocks, maybe a sign of overfeeding. I will stick to zucchinis and possibly spinach for the rest of the week/fortnight. There seems to be an oil film on the water surface (another indication of overfeeding maybe?) so I took out the oxydator and put in a new airpump connected to a co2 diffuser, hoping this will break more of the water surface and increase oxygen diffusion (existing canister filter only creates minor turbulence beneath the surface.

 

PH has remained at 7.4 but given that my shrimps have been berrying up I might just keep it stable instead of reducing it further. At this point I am considering an RO/DI unit but it seems a bit excessive for one 23L tank. I saw some Tangerine x Taibees today at the LFS and they look awesome!

 

Meanwhile I have started on making a shelter from smaller ceramic tubes and planning on rearranging the tank a bit at the end of next week. I suspect the existing ceramic tubes might be the culprit behind my stubborn PH. I tested with water that I keep in a bucket with PH adjusted to 6 and it stayed on that level after a week while water in the tank jumps back a day after. The substrate in the tank is supposed to keep PH at 6.5 planted and no other equipment seem to be able to alter the PH. Will keep this thread posted and follow up with photos one I take some. Hope everything goes well tomorrow.

 

Cheers,

Howard

[Howard18]

So I went to the LFS today to have a look at the Tangerine x Taibees, gave in and bought a few to see if they can live in the tank together with the Blue Velvets. The co2 diffuser is not working too well, I suspect due to the airpump's low output pressure and the fine ceramic diffuser.

 

The bubbles created by the air stone used to replace the co2 diffuser were too big, splashing water everywhere, wetting the lights, lids and back compartment so I've temporarily stopped using it. I've shortened the output pipe of the canister filter in hopes of increasing water surface movement and in preparation for my NAG glass oxydator.

 

I fed my shrimps a slice of zucchini today and they seem to love it. The berried shrimps are coming along well, some very close to term with visible eyes in the eggs. Some photos as promised.

 

Some photos of my berried shrimps:

 

 

 

 

Here's a tiny male perched on top of a ceramic cube:

 

 

The awesome looking Tangerine x Taibees:

 

 

Please excuse the algae, I'm getting the tank ready to ensure maximum survival rates of the forthcoming shrimplets.

 

Some photos of my shrimps feeding on the slice of zucchini:

 

 

 

Best regards,

Howard

[Disciple]

Awesome pictures Howard good stuff man

[revolutionhope]

wow love the photos!! that first berried BV shot is awesome!! wish you all the best for your soon to be born shrimplets and also with your new shrimp :-)

 

love n peace

 

will

[larrymull]

Back from Hawaii, and have come back to a great thread. Keep up the good work Howard.

[Howard18]

Thank you all for the encouraging words! Today has been quite a downer. I spent the whole day yesterday fixing up the new shelter for my shrimps and attaching a tube to the NAG oxydator air outlet (surprisingly difficult to get hard plastic tube to stick to glass, on hindsight silicone would have been better, guess that's my lesson learnt for the day) so I had little time to look at my shrimps. Today when I looked at them there were only 4 berried ones left. None of my shrimps died fortunately and I believe the one that either dropped her eggs or gave birth is the very first one that has gotten berried in my tank. I remember it was on May 10th. Is it at all possible for them to hatch in 18 days or has she indeed dropped them? I'm hoping it's the latter one. I'd hate to know I had it then lost them all.

Everything else is fine in the tank, all lively and swimming. Worrisome day today.

Best regards,

Howard

[revolutionhope]

The mean duration of the incubation period increased significantly (P < 0.005) with decreasing water temperature, from 12 days at 32°C to almost the double (21 days) at 24°C,

the above is taken from here -

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0119468

 

based on the above trial my uneducated guess is that if it is 18 days since you first noticed her being berried and she has lost her eggs then you would be unlucky. chances are they have hatched

Have a close look when you get a chance and I hope to hear some good news from you next time !!

No doubt someone will correct me if I'm wrong in any case time will tell so fingers crossed!

love n peace

 

will

[fishmosy]

Here is a useful link to info on temperature and hatching time.  18 days is certainly long enough to get a hatch. 

 

[Howard18]

Thanks for the useful links Will and Fishmosy. I've read through the articles yesterday and realised that at 18 days they are well ready to hatch, being a couple of days off the charts at 24.5°C. I looked all over the tank with a flashlight several times through the night but could not find a trace of the shrimplets but a very lively and peckish mother to the aforementioned shrimplets.

This morning when I woke up, true to your words of them having hatched, there were several shrimplets hanging out in the hairgrass and later in the evening, grazing on the algae I had left unbothered at the back panel. All is good again in my tank! As for Will and all viewers of my thread, some eye candy!

Sorry about the blurry photo, they are tiny and quite far away from the camera

Here's the one grazing on the back panel

Here are the ones in the hairgrass that I managed to find, wonder how many more are there?

On a side note my new shelter that I've spent days planning and glueing together and my modified NAG oxydator broke apart so I'll be redoing them again and will be getting some aquarium safe silicone tomorrow to make sure they stay attached.

 

Cheers,

Howard

[Howard18]

Today I noticed a lot of my shrimps are near the surface of the water seemingly grazing on an invisible film. This has been going on for a few days but previously it was just one or two shrimps. Today there were seven. It then struck me that there might not be enough oxygen in the tank as I have removed the Sochting and NAG oxydators for about a week now. I hastily switched on my airpump and the shrimps were instantly back down in the tank roaming about. After ten minutes and halfway into my lunch one of my berried females dropped dead, I suspect due to the sudden change in PH caused by the release of massive amounts of co2 from the tank water. It was a heavily berried female too so I went to the LFS immediately to buy a brine shrimp hatchery, removed all the eggs (counted 20) from the dead shrimp with a plastic spoon and placed them in the makeshift "shrimpcubator". The tank has been normal since and all other inhabitants are well except the fact that all the shrimplets that were previously out grazing are now nowhere in sight. I hope they made it through but I am pretty sure the swing might just be too much of a change for them.

It baffles me that my tapwater of PH 7.5, at 5.5 dkh, when lowered to a PH of 6.9 with circulation from an airpumpp jumps all the way to 7.9 after 24 hours. I am seriously contemplating the purchase of an RO/DI unit. I have had just about enough with trying to balance PH and oxygen levels in my tank. Will keep this thread updated.

Meanwhile some photos of the setup:

The "shrimpcubator":

The eggs with visible eyes:

Cheers,

Howard

[revolutionhope]

wow i admire that you are so commited you are incubating the eggs :-) i'll be interested to hear what any of the eggheads here have to say about your pH swing, i find such a drastic swing to be surprising too. i've always been a fan of ridiculous amounts of surface movement since i learnt the very basics about dissolved oxygen. but more recently i'm curbing the amount of surface movement i have trying to reduce the amount of evaporation (which equals increased TDS..)

i hope your shrimplets are ok, are they roughly a week old? i thought young shrimps have a lot more endurance/adaptability than the adults but i could be mistaken - maybe they need to be a little mature first.