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Hello SKFer's, I have a little treat for you. The first of many SKF "interviews" has been completed and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. ‌@ShrimpFan is a blogger/shrimpkeeper based in the United States. His blog is available in our blogs section, You can also find it at http://shrimpfan.blogspot.com.au/. Great read if you have not read it before I suggest you check it out. SKF- Hi ShrimpFan can you please tell us a little about yourself? SF - I got into this hobby a while back. I believe around 2007 when I was still keeping bettas and breeding bettas. In my search for live plants to assist my bettas breed better, I visited a local guy who was selling live plants. I saw his beautiful his tank was and saw that he had such an amazing planted tank (prior to this I didn’t not know live plants and aquarium went together). After buying the hornwort, I went home and did an eBay search and found a live plant seller (aquatic magic). I was captivated by those marimo moss balls and saw that in one of the photos, the photographer had a Crystal Red Shrimp. The moment I saw that red and white shrimp I became instantly hooked. It really opened the flood gates I could say. My blogger was a consummation of ideas between myself and the guy (now buddy) I visited FOR the live plants. We figured since shrimp keeping was pretty new, it would be a neat idea to blog about shrimping as a way to track our progress and share knowledge we’ve accumulated along the way. Personally, my blogger as grown to become my motivator for keeping up with the shrimping hobby. I find that writing about and taking pictures of my shrimps is a good motivating factor. It helps me unwind my thought processes and helps me maintain interest this slow paced hobby. Question 1 - What is your weekly/monthly maintenance schedule? SF - Ideally, I perform weekly water changes for all my tanks, but being that the past few months have been busy, I’ve only performed monthly water changes. I prep my water, age it for roughly 10hr+ and then perform the water change. Daily dosing involves dosing trace elements for my shrimps and plants. I only feed once, maybe twice, a week. Question 2 - What is your favorite additive/products? SF - Hands down, my favorite additives/products are the Shrimpy Daddy Revive Minerals and Vivace. I just adore those products because it really helped my shrimps gain that extra “gloss” and really added to the overall health of my shrimps. Question 3 - What is your worst shrimp experience? SF - My absolute worst shrimping experience has to be when I was a newer shrimp keeping and found success breeding Orange Eyes Blue Tigers (OEBT). Around this time, shrimping was getting big, and everyone was trying to establish themselves as either a breeder or provider for the shrimping world. Many new shrimps were coming into the hobby (Red Rili, Dream Blues, so on and so forth). I had a very healthy and happy colony of OEBT (massive size). I got really greedy and bought freshly imported Black Tigers and some Dream Blues. Being greedy and not having tanks cycled and ready, I figured well let’s toss them inside the OEBT tank being that they all share similar parameters requirements, it should work. Lord behold, the Dream Blues were carriers of that cloudy body bacteria. It completely decimated my OEBT colony. Not a single OEBT or BT survived. Dream blues were completely fine…. My greed lead to the downfall of my more precious OEBT tank.. That was nearly 6 years ago, I finally got over the loss and got back to keeping OEBT… Question 4 - What are the biggest myths in Shrimp Keeping? SF - Biggest myths… hmmm. I would have to say the biggest myths involves dosing ferts (macros, micros, traces) and injecting CO2. My personal belief is that all life forms requires some forms of trace elementals and nutrients to survive. Folks too quickly chalk up failures to this or that and really gave traces, macros, micros, and co2 a bad rep. They dose heavily, experienced bad results, and shoved it aside as bad. My philosophy is that less is more, and some is better than none. Do it right, do it smart, and you’ll experience success. Question 5 - Unusual things that you use with your shrimps? SF - Nothing really to talk about. I rarely do anything to my shrimps. I do have sort of a tinkering drive. I’m always messing around with equipment and modifying things to add to my shrimp tanks, but nothing directly related to my shrimps. Question 6 - Can you give us tips on selective breeding? And how to improve the quality of our shrimps? SF - My only real advice is never conform. If you have a preset goal, never divert from the goal and never conform because of any reasons. Example: I’m currently working really hard at selectively breeding my JRB. My goals are to breed for the best looking REDs, Red Legs, and great posture. What this means is I will not conform my standard when I see a really nice JRB with good whites and poor reds. Regardless of secondary characteristics, the first three must be achieved for the shrimps to not be culled. Create a goal, make it simple, and stick to it. Be aggressive. You’re working towards a goal, and if it’s selective breeding, then it doesn’t matter much if you have a super large colony. A colony of 10 extremely beautiful shrimps outweighs 1000 average looking shrimps. Lastly, remember that a single individual ugly shrimp can and will undo years of hard work. So cull, cull and cull. I cull 50% of my babies. Question 7 - What do you think will be the next big thing in shrimp? Will it come from crosses or line breeding pure species? SF - Great question!! If you were to ask me this 5 years ago, I’d tell you it’s all about line purity (gosh sound like Mr. Hitler) but honestly, it feels like folks today are all about mixing and matching. Years ago, the thought of mixing a tiger x crs was greatly frowned upon. Mixing was seen as a way to create mutts and muddle the lines and hard work of the original breeders. What’s the say… Mixing Yellow Neos and Red neos will result in brown neos? Such was the mindset of that time. But now… well now we’re reaching a point where breeding shrimps (especially mixing) has become a way for folks to express themselves. Similar to a painter painting his masterpiece, creating your own one-of-a-kind shrimp is a work of art and expressionism at its truest form. I think mixing is new and exciting. I believe it to be the trend now. Equally, I believe are those purist out there who still holds true the belief of perfecting a line and working towards a goal of having the best of the best (myself in this group). Now what I would love to see happening is a collaboration between the creators and perfectos. That would be an amazing sight to see!! Question 8 - How do you mineralize and what WP do you aim for? SF - I mineralize my water with Shrimp Daddy’s Revive Bianco mineralizers. Alfa and Beta for Bee shrimps, and Alfa, Beta, and Gamma for Tiger species. I pre-mix, and age the water inside my containers for 10hr+ before performing the water change. Parameters wise, for Bee shrimps, I aim for 6dGH, 6.0-6.2PH, TDS: doesn’t matter much as long as it’s not ridiculous, 0dKH, Temp: 74-76, depending on how hot the day is and how hard my fans are blowing. The rest of the parameters I don’t test. Question 9 - What food enhances the welling being of shrimps and increase shrimplets survival rates? SF - Honestly, I don’t subscribe to the idea that one food is better than another. Different different foods offers different things. In a hobby that is still very young, I find that the excessive amount of foods available to the market as a telling sign. How many brands can claim something and have it be true. My theory is most, if not all, foods contain the same ingredients. Some are even just repurposed foods from other pet industries. Ex: Snowflake is a soy husk based foods for horses. Barley is barley straw pellets and serves as an algaecide for rivers and lakes. Stinging Nettle leaves pellets is a parrot food. Etc… The key to increasing survival rates is stability and consistency. Don’t tinker with the tanks too much and don’t bother the shrimps too much. Imagine how scary it would be for your if someone 1000x your size kept coming at you and looking at you. HAH! Let nature be. Question 10 - How often do you cull? SF - Very often. For my JRB colony, I cull as much as 50% of my babies. Of course, the culls are moved to a separate tank whereas they continue to live and breed. Exceptional babies from the culled tanks that meet my breeding goals are re-introduced back to the main breeding tank. Question 11 - What is your funniest shrimp experience? SF - My funniest AND wildest shrimping experience would have to be with my Taiwan Bees. They LOVE to climb out and break the water surface whenever I perform my waterchanges. I have a little water pump that they always love to climb on whenever the water is newly drained and the conditions are moist enough to allow them to do so. I’ve recorded them doing this in the past. I laugh because I imagine them hanging out on the shaking pump and picture them sitting in a massage chair. Lastly on behalf of SKF and its members, I wanted to thank ShrimpFan again.

Not available for sale, in limited quantities just working out how best to giveaway.

LOL so the one time I get some SKF branded stuff not to sell, everyone wants to buy one. Tell you what, I'll give away to the next 15ish people that either make a purchase (from today till they are all gone) from any of our sponsors ( @ageofaquariums, @Kitz, @Squiggle, @newbreed or @The Tech Den) or make a donation of any amount to SKF or become a SKF subscription member. PM me the evidence along with your postal address. Open to international members as well. I'll send the first batch over the weekend.

I like to use analog thermometers, the type with the increments marked on the glass so they can't move. Preferably the type with a big scale so they're more accurate. When I buy them I have to go through a whole batch to find the ones that all read the same, ie right. I'll take those and leave behind the ones that are wrong - sometimes more than half the batch are reading high or low. Price doesn't seem to factor in. Once you have thermometers that you know to be correct, you can use them to calibrate others that might not be so good. If you don't have any that you know to be right, I you can't really trust any of them. I'd accept the middle value from the cheapo thermometer for now. What does the temperature display on your TDS pen show?

May I just say this was an awesome comp :) thank you newbreed and the mods that were involved :) 10/10

So the Shrimp bug has got me bad! Started out wishing to get some shrimp again, after previously keeping RCS I was hoping to fill (the old tank)140l which we upgraded to a 450L Juwel Rio. Before I got the shrimp for the 140L I was already keen to start a 60L nano display tank inspired by the same tank on display at Aquotix Aquariums. After setting up the 140L to keep shrimp and finding them currently difficult to source in Perth WA I joined this forum. Thanks to Disciple who gifted me twenty or so of his Red Rili/Blue Gene culls the tank is not so empty. Infant no more, in less the a week i already have shrimplets, + three berried females. While this colony has begun to thrive my mind has been focussed on setting up the 60L. Thanks to Disciple and other forums members I have been eagerly researching and absorbing information about the best WP to keep shrimp as well as the different shrimp available and the conditions they require to live, thrive and multiply. I had planned the 60L tank as my display tank for the Rilis and the current 140L for the rili culls, a practice which I've only just become familiar to. However I now wish to keep the new tank with Snowball and Blue Tiger Shrimp and will sort out an alternative option for keeping my Rili culls when that opportunity finally comes :) (I'm really looking forward to having a healthy crop to weed out, so to speak!) I just really want to develop my current Rilis into a higher grade of Rilis, something i never got into when previously keeping RCS. Sooooo! a nano tank setup can be just expensive as a larger setup , but Im having a lot of fun preparing for the tank which I have ordered from Aquatix, the tank should be here in a fortnight, yeah!!! So far I have purchased the Benabachi powder as a substrate, a Sicce Space Eko external filter and a hydro 200w external heater. Now I require help with selecting the lighting. I am thinking to go with 2x Ista LED light as setup with the current Aquatix tank however I really am keen on the Fluvial LED which has been discontinued and awaiting a replacement/newer model, I can purchase the older model online but am hesitant to purchase something thats discontinued + the price comparison between the fluval and the ista is quite considerable. I wish to purchase whats going to be be the best for my future planted/shrimp tank in the future, also there is no rush in making a decision as Im currently happy spending my time with the Rilis's and our larger tank which I'm seriously considering purchasing a C02 setup for. As far as Aquascaping goes i have really been inspired by JacksonL's Journal to use a DSM with the new tank. I'd also like any advice on wood vs rock or a mixture of both when it comes to hard furnishing the tank. Substrate Im unsure If Benibachi with a laterite base is good or if I should use, benibachic alone with root tabs for the plants ore one of the ecoplant or sachem substrates as a base layer and the benibachi on top as i do wish for this to be a planted/shrip tank. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. This may be a boring first post but be assured to watch this space! Once I have the 60L tank Illl begin to post photos of the setup, and once the 140L Rili tank starts producing some more exiting produce Ill post picture of that to, opposed to a "one shrimp (rili cull) hanging out next to a berried chick in 140L of water". "its a deep tank for twenty semi mature shrimp" its like Wheres Wally when I first go in there. Thanks again to Disciple who not only took the time to reply to my posts on this forum but also offered to get me started with my first Rili family HUGE THANKS! Im sure after spending some time with you in person your shrimp keeping enthusiasm has fed and multiplied my current Shrimp MANIA! Thanks guys! Peace out, Astro

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Hi all, Ok, I got the ingredients, a little different as what jayc's recommendation, but still sourcing bee pollen and chlorella powder to do another batch with them. Here are a couple of pictures of the process Getting everything in place I made 2 bathes, one like jayc's method and then like shrimp daddy like on his website, but the shrimp daddy's method didnt work out so good Jayc method, worked great, will add some photos when I feed the shrimps Even Zazo, our Jack russel couldnt resist the good smell :) Thanks @jayc for another great DIY

Thanks raukem, I'll keep you guys posted with my progress ?

Nah it's cool mate, flick mine to someone who has a fridge to put it on, haha.

@GotCrabs, @2OFUS, you got me in a fairly good mood. PM me your addresses and I'll post one out to you 2 sometime this/next week. Actually, when I say limited quantities, I'm talking around 40. lol

Looks like Kate Moss to me.

A big thanks to Newbreed for supplying the goodies and Oz for running the comp Great work guys

LOL Grubs. So what was your opinion to the original question? 1, 2, or 3 - which thermometer to believe?

your welcome :) For those who didnt win a prize and like the look of the products check out www.newbreedaquatics.com.au

Congratulations Jo you have won the final prize Ten pack of Tantora Catappa Leaves and a pack of Benibachi Kale Tablets . Please pm me your details. Thanks to everyone who participated in the competition. There will be another one in the not too distant future!

Important - a heater is not a thermometer. Never believe the heater (they sometimes lie!). IMO you always need an independent measure of the water temp, even if its just a weekly whip around with a thermometer. A heater is not designed to read the temperature of the water. It is made to repond to the temperature of the water to turn a heating element on/off and other factors will be at play (heat losses, hysteresis, input voltage). Subtle, but different. The calibration of the heater will change slightly in tanks of different sizes and with the temperature of the room as these alter the duration of on-off cycles... we don't care about such small variations...but sometimes the thermostat breaks, or we forget to turn the heater on, or the element in the heater partially fails (could be hotter or colder). The worst types of problems are normally the partial failures that we don't spot - e.g. heater is only putting out 70% of the heat it used to, cant keep up and all the fish catch a cold and die of white spot. All that said - IMO give or take a degree or two rarely matters. The real world varies a LOT more than our tanks, Edit: I would use 2-3 thermometers as you have done - chuck away any that are more than 2C out, and calibrate the heater to the remaining, but know that doing so is just for your benefit of seeing the knob on the heater have the same number - you still cant believe its going to be that temp all the time. Edit... jeeze I crap on sometimes.

Heater calibration doesn't actually do anything. Its far better practice to read the temp of the water (how else will you know if the heater is working or keeping up with losses?) and turn the heater up or down accordingly - the numbers on the heater knob are irrelevant apart from telling you which way to turn... and perhaps to give you a rough approximation of how far to turn it.

It does cause swings, but it's not an issue at all. pH swings can be an indicator of water issues, but the swing caused by co2 is no problem. definitely turn it off at night, it saves you from using unnecessary co2 and stops you gassing the tank when the plants go from producing oxygen during the day to producing co2 at night. my co2 system comes on an hour and a half before lights on so that my levels are right as soon as the plants start photosynthesising, low/unstable co2 with lights on can cause algae. get a drop checker and 4 dkh solution with indicator so you can see roughly what the co2 levels are in the tank. I have the co2 turn off an hour before lights off.

Congrats to current winners!! Good luck everyone!!

Your local University would be the best bet I would think, not sure what the process would be or who to contact though.

Flick some photos up here, we'll all argue over what is what for you, haha.

Nogi don't feed them for 2/3 days and then hold a piece of algae wafer or something in your fingers (right next to the lens) and then snap away :)