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Okay got that terrible disease we all get a bad case of MORETANKITIS. It started with the plan to keep it very basic and minimal. A while ago I got some really nice driftwood from Fishmosy and couldn't resist using some. So it is still evolving and was done a budget of $0. I decided to split the 3ft tank into two sections and remebered that I had some glass dividers spare and thought too easy they are already drilled. Went to get them and then remembered I gave them to the guy who bought three 4ft tanks of me....Damn!!!! What now???? I found some fairly thick clear perspex. Cool this will work.......Now how can I add add holes for flow between the two sides? I know I will cover the holes with plastic mesh. Searched high and low couldn't find any. Ahhhhhhh!!!! I threw it out a few weeks ago.......Damn!!!! I was trying to think of what to do when I noticed the top of an old fry breeding box. So I cut out a rectangle at the bottom and fitted some plastic flywire to stop shrimplets getting through and fixed it in place. Works a treat. I then cut the perspex divider a couple of mm less then the width of the tank and split some old air hose which I fitted onto each side. This allowed me to jam it into position firmly enough to stay but also allows me to take it out if I decide to take it back to a single tank, without having to try and clean up silicone. Driftwood, mixture of shrimp sand, black gravel, small river pebble, clay balls, grey slate Hang on filter, air filters So I have used some bolbitis, sword, val, java fern, windolove, Native moss, riccia fluteans, subwassertang. I intend to put some hornwort and elodea at the back and am also going to add some marshwort which I hope will grow up to the water level and give a waterlily type look. I still have some plants to go in at the back to get some height but here are a few pictures. You can see the lid of the fry saver used as a vent. Be kind and remember this was done on a zero budget One of the pieces was a branch so I decided to use it and make it look like a weeping willow and attached it to a piece of slate then added some java moss I decided to hide the air filter behind the large piece of driftwood. The moss ledges from Newbreed

Good afternoon my fellow Shrimp Keepers, I hope you are all having a great weekend, as promised the 2nd installment of the SKF interview. Today I have one of our own, Paul Minnet. He is a very well respected member of the shrimp keeping community and is a admin for a couple of the most popular shrimp related facebook groups in Australia and Overseas when he isn't to busy with his own business or his admin duties he is looking after his massive 21 sectioned RACK!!! SKF - Hi Paul can you please tell us a little about yourself? PM - I have had aquariums on and off most of my life have had at least one tank continuously now for over 25 years. In that time I have kept most types of fish. I discovered the joys of shrimp a few years ago while looking for an algae clean up crew like most of us started out with some reasonable red cherry and the rest is history. Question 1 - What is your weekly/monthly maintenance schedule? PM - I mostly do weekly Water changes 20% roughly on all tanks I clean up duckweed plants etc. every couple of weeks. clean filters every couple of months. Question 2 - What is your favorite additive/products? PM - I don’t really have a favourite additive I have tried a few different additives and booster products but generally feel there is no replacement for a healthy tank. Question 3 - What is your worst shrimp experience? PM - My worst experience is my recent disaster from rushing stocking the new rack and not allowing it time to establish and settle properly in the haste I caused too much instability and crashed the system and lost all my tb misch and tibee. Question 4 - What are the biggest myths in Shrimp Keeping? PM - The biggest myth I think is that shrimp require a small specific range of conditions to do well I have found this to be very untrue and that you can keep most shrimp in a wide range of conditions as long as the tank has a healthy biosphere. Question 5 - Unusual things that you use with your shrimps? PM - I feed dried anchovy fillets at times as well as dried shitake mushrooms which is probably a little odd. Question 6 - Can you give us tips on selective breeding? And how to improve the quality of our shrimps? PM - When selective breeding don’t always look for the best shrimp occasionally you can do better with the ugly duckling. ultimately but you are looking for desirable traits in the shrimp be it colour size vigour etc. Question 7 - What do you think will be the next big thing in shrimp? Will it come from crosses or line breeding pure species? PM - Shrimp genetics is still somewhat of a mystery I think there is a lot of interesting varieties being produced from taitibee lines. There is still a lot of room for new lines to come out of keeping pure lines in both cherry and bees still a few colours to be achieved. Question 8 - How do you mineralize and what WP do you aim for? PM - I use two mineral products primarily seachem equilibrium for gh and seachem reef builder for kh and ph I aim for a ball park range of 6.8-7.2 ph gh 3-5 kh 1-2 tds 160-190 using rain water. Question 9 - What food enhances the welling being of shrimps and increase shrimplets survival rates? PM - A varied diet of fresh foods like peas zucchini etc combined with a mic of commercial shrimp foods as well as things like rolled oats dried shitake mushroom etc. I find helpful to supplement there main food source from the tank environment. baby survival I think depends more on the tanks biosphere than it does on food you supply. Question 10 - How often do you cull? PM - I cull regularly picking out the rejects as you see them. I pick a grade point that is the minimum standard I want for the colony and reject everything that doesn’t meet that level. Question 11 - What is your funniest shrimp experience? PM - One of the more amusing moments would have been recently trying to take photos of the shrimp in the top tank of the rack I was standing on a bench seat with the camera and tripod setup on a second seat. I stepped back to focus for the pic the chair I was standing on tipped back nearly knocking me and the dslr camera and tripod onto the floor would of been very funny to watch but I wasn’t amused and haven’t tried it again since. I wanted say on behalf of SKF and its members, Thank you. Lastly Paul has also agreed to become a member of the admin on our facebook group "Shrimp Keepers Community".

I am glad you like it and you are learning from it. Those were my two main goals for these interviews. The third is to show that everyone thinks and does things differently.

Ziss EZ Breeding Box BL-2 http://shrimpkeepersforum.com/forum/index.php/topic/8879-new-arrivalsziss-ez-breeding-box/ Initial thoughts: well packaged and easy to put together except for the clip, I found it really hard to get it to attach to the breeding box, I do like that it’s an adjustable clip but so you can adjust it to suit your tanks water level. 1 week on. The inhabitants seem happy and healthy, I tried the suction cups and as I suspected they failed with in 24hours and released the shrimp I'd spent time selecting . Then I had to do battle with the clip so I could hang it from the side of the tank. The clip is definitely more secure, but it’s a pain in the bum to attach the clip to the box. There is a little adjustable bar at the bottom to level the box out depending on if your using the suction cups or the clip. It’s not very ridged making it too easy to move and even the slightest bump, like when taking the lid off, can push the bar in. To adjust the bar back out, the hole box needs to come out or you need to put your hand in the tank. Things I like: It has a lid It has an air stone on the back that pumps water in to the box to get water circulating, and a valve to control the airflow allows you to adjust the water turn over. The mesh sides seem to provide good flow to help keep the w.p consistent with the rest of the tank. expandable, with the addition of an expantion ring you can add another box on for more area. I’ve also got one of the meta cubs to test now too so I’ll do a comparison review soon

Great work wot_fan keep it up. Brilliant pictures as always

Really liking these interviews. I'm learning a lot from them.

Yeah rotala at the back. Got some AR mini from @GotCrabs (thanks dude) which will go as a midground. Updates to come soon :) Yeah thought I'd try a different heater this time and the AquaEl looked nice and discreet like you said. And no glass which is a plus!

Great write up, keep them coming.

I'm pretty sure they hatched rather than being rejected, especially since she was accidentally left on the ground for a bit after she flipped out of the net and it took a ages to find her. But even after that harrowing experience she held the eggs for another week. She could be either a algea eater or glass, but both shrimp from memory can be a bit hit and miss raising the young in a fresh water tank situation. I guess it will just be a waiting game to see if the young can survive fresh water, the filter and the spotted blue eyes. Since the blackmore river shrimplets manage to outwit the spotted blue eyes I'm pretty sure other shrimplets should be able too as well. For comparison here is a berried blackmore river shrimp, smaller body and larger eggs in comparison to the locally caught shrimp

My husband didn't believe me at how quick Bolt the speeding snail could get around until he had actually seen Bolt in one place looked away and then had to hunt to see where Bolt had disappeared to and it wasn't within a 1cm or 2 like you would have expected. I have watched him speed across the glass and I think its interesting that while racing along he will still be feeding. I had wondered if all the racing about was searching for suitable/ desired foods. Unless he's only tasting as he scrapes his mouth over the glass on his merry way.

Sorry it has been so long since my last update. The tank has had its ups and downs in the last few months but I think I have everything on track again. The main issue I had was low pH. For some reason, every time I swapped out the Purigen in the tank for Purigen I had recharged, the pH would drop. When I started losing shrimp I checked the WP and found the pH was about 5.5. I used aragonite to slowly raise the pH. It has been stable for about 6 weeks at about 6.7. I lost my remaining adults but many of the juveniles and shrimplets survived. I would guess there are about 50 shrimp in the tank now. The good news is the oldest of these are starting to get berried. Two berried this weekend and there are at least half a dozen more with saddles forming. My colony should be growing again soon. Below are few pictures of my shrimp. Sorry, I forgot to clean the glass before taking them. Also, I recently fed powdered food so the water may look a little cloudy.

I just tried one and seems really good. Feels like heaps of space for the shrimp i already caught. Hopefully it is still hanging on the morning. Took me awhile to catch these guys.

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

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.