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Barney Springs is a pretty special place Ever since I first visited Barney Springs I've wanted to do a biotope tank. Here are a few shots and a video of the shrimp from Barney Springs. I believe they could be the same species as Caridina sp. 'Malanda' but time will tell. Here is a shot of the tank as I set it up when I got the shrimp home. I actually brought the red rocks back with me from Cairns. Extra 15kg of luggage! Anyway the layout of the tank has been changed since then and is under constant tweaking. I'll post a full build of the tank once I'm happy with its layout. Also I'm swapping the filter from a Fluval 106 to an Eden 511 because the Fluval is just too powerful for the tank. I have to have the pipes closed at least 60% to stop the shrimp being blown around. Here are some shots of the shrimp a couple of days after they were first added to the tank. You'll notice some of the shrimp seem to have a disease - their bodies are white indicating tissue necrosis. This was probably related to stress during transport. I culled a couple of the worst ones but the others came good after a week or so. A handful of losses out of the 50 or so that I packed is not bad. The shrimp like Boss Aquaria's Snow Here is a video of them chowing down

Got my new Anubias plants today and got another 10 on the way, brought more then i need lol :S Heres a couple of photos baring in mind its not scaped and wont be until i move house in 5months or so as i dont want to have to move wet lava rock.

Hi all, As some of you know, my currently my set-up looks like this. With enormous amount of help and encouragement from my fiancee, we have now got the fishroom to this state. It feels awesome walking in there to play with water :o Amazingly for me things have not stop improving here! We are in the process of building a new house and getting a purpose build fishroom in it. The construction started just before Christmas last year. In this fishroom I wanted to have some of the things I wished I had or I had done in my current set-up. 1st Priority: Insulation I wanted to be able to keep the room warm in winter and cool in summer with minimal power consumption. Living in Canberra we get cold winters (nights especially) and a week or two of extreme heat every summer. We decided to build the the whole structure; house and fishroom, with a relatively new building material suggested to us by our builder. It is a thermal facade system called 'Exsulite' it is manufactured by Dulux. It is a system that uses foam, foil, airgaps and various boards. It provides a lot better thermal protection than regular bricks for example. Between this system and the gyprock regular insulation batts are fitted. The whole house including the fishroom and the garage has insulation batts on the ceiling as well. I also decided against a door that opens to outside and windows to minimize heat loss through these. 2nd Priority: Access to water I wanted to make sure I had all that I needed within the room in terms of access to water as well as getting rid of waste water. I decided to have a 42L laundry tub fitted into the room to provide all important 'cleaning' station. I no longer need to take over the laundry or worse the kitchen during certain maintenance of various fishkeeping related items. I have also got a separate tap installed next to the laundry tub to have my water reservoir line to be permanently connected to this tap. I won't need to connect and disconnect this line unnecessarily in the future. A center drain in the middle of the room was also a must. 3rd Priority: Access to power As with almost everybody that is in the aquarium hobby, I always found I needed more power points than what is available around the tank/tanks. This always inevitably leads to using of powerboards, but even with using quality ones there is always potential to overload or something to go wrong. As much as possible I wanted to avoid using power boards and double adapters in the fishroom, though I know resistance is futile and I might resort to these at some stage. To ensure I have access to power where I needed I decided to get 20 quad power points installed in the room! That is 80 power points!!! I had to show photos of my current set-up to the builder and the electrician when their eyebrows were raised when I requested this. They were wondering why I need this much power? :anonymous: I am getting the power points put in two lines; one over the other. One line is going to be connected to a wired timer. These power points are for the lights. The second line is ordinary points for various other equipment. The electrician have put another box and 3 circuits in this room alone! 4th Priority: Lighting and ventilation As already mentioned, will be lighting all my tanks relatively well by fishroom standards. I do not see the point of having a fishroom where you can't see the inhabitants of the tanks very well. Each row of tanks are to have LED lights fitted above them. I have recently been replacing my T8 fluoro units with these. I am finding this is saving me a lot of energy. As I have been known to leave smelly things in the fishroom; like a bucket of blackworms that have died, it was super important for my fiancee that the room can be easily ventilated! This was something I wanted anyway as the room has no windows and no access to outside aerating the room is not possible. We are getting a toilet/bathroom style exhaust fan installed in the room. Its a type of model that has flaps that close when not in operation providing no gap for heat loss. The room is getting two ceiling flouro lights as well, for the times I might walk into the room when the tank lights are off. That's about the progress so far. We are still couple of months away from completion.

so i just think, it's the time to put 1 floating plant each tank and compare them later i focus on the nitrate and how easy is it to grow, how faster it multiply journal will be finish in 6 months and no stem plant, i hate stem, no offence guys

Some pics of my Caridina confusa from Short Creek

Hi shrimp lovers, I am recently back to my hobby again. I bought a 30l Aquael shrimp tank and Up Aqua substrate from Tech Den. Special thanks to @Disciple who sold me a pack of top quality 10 crs to start. He and I had a chat about shrimp hobby which took almost 2 hours but I thought it was like 15 mins lol. Time flies when talking about shrimps. I've learnt a lot from when we had a chat. It was great meeting you again @Disciple. I hope we have a chance to see again some time. I am planning to start a Tainwan Bee tank for next step but I will see how I go with the crs first. Hopefully everyone on here is happy to help me out if I have any trouble :) Thanks for reading. Here are my photos

Was showing off my tanks to @kizshrimp today and he found one of my stranger pets growing on the glass of my C. typus grow out tank. A freshwater colonial bryozoan.

I would be down to around 200 I reckon. And possibly 60% would be under 1cm. I have sold sooooooo many! Glad that I keep hearing that juvies I have sold are now berried it parents. Nice that this tank has helped a fair few on their CRS journeys. I look forward to it getting back to berries though!!

My money is on the Duckweed, that stuff multiplies amazingly fast.

This tank us still a great inspiration for me since i joined. Thanks for the updates. Hopefully in 6 months I'll have my crs sections as full as yours.

So had to give the CRS jungle a tidy up today. They have stopped breeding over winter, hopefully they get busy again soon!! Lol really happy with how they're developing! did have a spate of mystery deaths, first time in eighteen months, so was shocked. Have done the usual water changes, mineral powder, beta-g, IAL and alder cones to arrest it! All seems stable now thankfully!! mainly older ones popping off so may also be the colony has reached its limits!

Short Creek is an interesting little spot. It is located near a tea farm on the tablelands above Cairns. Why is it named 'short creek' you ask? Well it might have something to do with a 'short' drop! We only sampled a short section but found a wide variety of organisms above these water falls including Caridina confusa, purple spot gudgeons and a species of freshwater crayfish (I forget the name, Bob will remind me when he remembers that I caught one for him, and he didn't catch any!). Water parameters (in May) were: pH: 6.8 TDS: 21 Temperature: 19*C GH: < 20 ppm KH: < 10 ppm the shrimp were mainly located in the back eddies associated with vegetation or branches ect. that were hanging into the water. Unfortunately it was drizzling with rain most of the time we were there so I wasn't able to get any nice shots of the shrimp fresh from the creek. I did get a nice shot of a purple spot. However I have pics of the confusa I brought home, currently housed in a temporary set-up alongside some snails (temp 20*C, TDS 60, GH and KH < 1, pH 7). I'm not sure why these are called the false zebra shrimp. For starters, these are massive compared to the zebras (4-5cm vs. 3cm for zebs). I've really fallen for these guys and can't wait to set up their new tank. I think they should be called fusa (The Fusa are coming - Madagascar, anyone?) or confusa. 'False zebra shrimp' (yawn) just undersells them so much. They aren't fussy at all, eating all of the normal aquaria shrimp fare. Likewise I haven't lost a single one through the travel and their housing. They can be a little rowdy at feeding time, crawling over each other and running off with bits of food away from the others - maybe not ideal for keeping with smaller shrimp like Malanda, chameleons or Zebs. But I find that adds to their appeal, rather than detracting. I will report on things like 'how good an algae eater' or 'ease of breeding' once their new tank is set-up, BUT breeding should be relatively straight forward as I believe they have large eggs and drop direct developing young, similar to zebs. Another cool thing with these guys is that can seem to have a golden glow and iridescence - at least under the LED lights over their temporary housing. hopefully I can get some better pictures of what that looks like with more time.

If you end up setting up another tank for them, go at least 20L. Definitely filtered. My little chameleon setup has been fantastic (20L approx.). The chameleons are always out in the open BUT I dont give them lots of hiding places and there is no fish in the tank.

Here's the photo of the tank at 1 week: The 2 Pogostemon Helferi stems have taken to emmersed life well and are starting to put out some new leaves already: Tank maintenance so far has been nice and simple, every day after work I take the cling wrap off the tank for half an hour to let in some fresh air then give it a bit of a mist of water from a spray bottle then cover it back up. If only every tank could be such low maintenance!

The plants from @OzShrimp Fern from @fishmosy Shrimp love it. Some of the leaves have been eaten lol hoping it will bounce back.

lol well that saved me some time!

I always find the chameleons are EXCELLENT hiders, I put a few in my 4ft tank with threadfins, corydoras, otocinclus, Borneo suckers and Riffle shrimp. So far the only times I have actually located the chameleons is when I cause MAJOR disruption in the tank. Mainly moving all the plant life and logs and basically anything the shrimp could and would be hiding on, under or in. Once I have basically chased everyone out of hiding holes I am always pleasantly suprised to find plenty of chameleons and Riffle shrimp still all in attendance, if a little miffed about being dislodged. Even in the tank that has lots of blackmore river shrimp I can rarely locate the chameleons that I know are in there, they just prefer the hollow log and being under the leaf litter instead of being out in the open. If you do go for another tank with just chamleons then I would go at least 30-40 L, with heater, light and filteration. Plants I would say are a must as is some nicely aged timber and good old IAL. The main thing I have found with native shrimp is to do as Dave suggests and pre-age the water before doing water changes, this seems to really be the main way of ensuring the shrimps survial, thriving and breeding.

@newbreed to the rescue!

Some pictures taken over the last week. The shrimp are showing more red and blue colouration now. they also enjoy Benibachi kale tablets

I did it a few months ago. It was very nice, but also kinda boring. So now I started over with rocks and plants. This was just the beginning phase. At this moment I have a lot more plants already.