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Good afternoon my fellow Shrimp Keepers, I have received the answers for the 5th SKF interview. Today we have a interview from @Gbang. He is a very well respected breeder that is well known for his world class Cherry shrimp but he should also be known for all the other great shrimp he has. SKF - Hi Mr Ng can you please tell us a little about yourself? GB - Hi guys my name is Glenn Ng and I've been a shrimpaholic since 2010! I first started aquarium keeping back in 2003 when a friend got a job at a fish store and i spent my youth regularly hanging out at his place of work. I've been hooked ever since and have enjoyed breeding many varieties of cichlids, from malawi and tangs to americans and catfish. 5 years ago i started breeding crayfish for fun and that was highly enjoyable. And then the minature livestock bug came in where i went from dwarf cichlids to neolamprologus shelldwellers.One day i stumbled upon a shrimp website and after looking at an sss mosura crs, i have been hooked on shrimp breeding since!While my forte and success is mainly neocaridina, my love for caridinas is just as intense and ive had a lot of fun with breeding programmes of many kinds. To date i still do keep many cichlids and catfish but my main passion currently has been shrimps, pseudomugil, rasboras and fancy guppies. Question 1 - What is your weekly/monthly maintenance schedule? GB - My maintenance schedule is based on a 10-20% water change fortnightly. During the week i maintain a variety of stable and natural vegetable based foods while planning the occasional protein rich meals and a constant supply of nutritious leaves. Every fortnight to a month, i also perform a cull run and analyse how my breeding objectives are coming along. Question 2 - What is your favorite additive/products? GB - By far i am the biggesr fan of boss aquaria baby powder and booster. It has worked wonders for me and really increased the survival rates of not only baby shrimps but fish! They absolutely love it. Benibachi products also have a been a huge hit for me. In particular the benibachi bee max has been a great bacteria additive. But if you were to ask me whats my favourite product. It would be hands down saltyshrimp products. It is almost the sole reason why everyone in the world has great shrimp success!ALMOST Question 3 - What is your worst shrimp experience? GB - My worse shrimp experience was possibly spending over nine hundred dollars on a reputable breeder who sold me pure line shrimp. These were not technically good enough to be classed as prl and pbl and were some of the brownest shrimp i have ever seen. Assuming that they just were not acclimatising well to the tank i waited for the first generation of babies, which were probably worse then the parents. What frustrated me most of all was being there at the breeders house before the sale and seeing all the quality stock he had....which he clearly did not choose for me. In fact, i ended up using those shrimp purchased as part of my pinto mischling programmes.Luckily i have met many genuine hobbyists and fellow enthusiasts that have helped me achieve the status of a pure line shrimp breeder and i now have a wonderful colony of prl and pbl. wink emoticon Question 4 - What are the biggest myths in Shrimp Keeping? GB - That you dont gravel clean. I have seen some people with amazing success gravel cleaning every 3 months. After 4 years of shrimp keeping, i tried it myself and the results were amazing! Question 5 - Unusual things that you use with your shrimps? GB - I occasionally use brine shrimp to fatten my colony up and occasionally use a frozen food produce called fish fuel. Specifically the goldfish frozen mix and turtle veg mix are very popular with the shrimps! Question 6 - Can you give us tips on selective breeding? And how to improve the quality of our shrimps? GB - Well....when i am in low numbers i really only concentrate on the culling of males in my colony. Once the numbers are high the main criteria i base my selective breeding is on size, shape pattern and colour. Question 7 - What do you think will be the next big thing in shrimp? Will it come from crosses or line breeding pure species? GB - Mainly crosses are taking a huge wave of interest due to the surprises in store. Soon enough Aura blue crosses and tangtaibee programmes will be incredibly popular due to the genetic variability. It already is in europe and asia! I would kill for some aura blue to create an aura hybrid colony! I would also imagine that many purists will further continue the pure red and black lines and work on an sss and white pure line programme soon. Question 8 - How do you mineralize and what WP do you aim for? GB - I remineralise ro water with saltyshrimp gh plus to a tds of 100-120 for caridinas. With cherries i do the same with ro water to a tds of 150 using gh kh plus. However, ince the shrimps have settled, i do try to use a mixture of tap and ro remineralised again to tds 150 as i would like to "harden" cherry shrimps so to speak. Question 9 - What food enhances the welling being of shrimps and increase shrimplets survival rates? GB - 100% boss aquaria baby powder and benibachi baby food has been amazing for me. I am also a big believer of natural greenfoods and leaves as well as bee pollen which has a lot of nutrition. Question 10 - How often do you cull? GB - I normally cull ever 3 to 4 weeks and also pending if any shrimplets reach 12-15mm just before they are ready to breed! Question 11 - What is your funniest shrimp experience? GB - I dont have a particular funny shrimp experience but one incident that comes to mind was discovering the German word or term for the female shrimps breastplate. The word was "tigershaufel". Needless to say, many tasteless, inappropriate and countless jokes were pulled off....and constantly repeated lol I wanted say on behalf of SKF and its members, Thank you very much Glenn. I have to agree I love looking at the Tigershaufels on females.

Yeah that's what I'm looking at doing. Just trying to locate the CSS file.

Thank you ?

Well taaaaaadaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, my stand is finished. Its not perfect but it will do the job, bask in the glory of my flaws! Big thank you to @perplex for the stand design. The stain actually cost more then the wood including cutting. Wood cut to size and the mdf off cut cost me about $35. 1ltre of stain, 100 nails and brushes cost me about $70 lol. In factoring in the amount of drill bits that broke in the making of the tank i think it would be close to $150 for this dodgey ass thing lol. Not to mention i also didnt realised the tank wasnt 60x60x60 until i already had everything cut to size hence why the tank is so small in comparison.

Love the idea! But yeah it's a bit big and distracting at the moment. The style it is in when you mouse-over the person's name is actually ideal I think - if you just rearrange it so that it fits better on the left panel. here's an example of what I mean:

Glad I'm not the only one. The idea is good but just too big

I like it too but agree with OzShrimp. A bit in yo face! (I think it's the colour)

Well on the weekend drove from Brisbane to Maryborough for a breeding system. Was a long drive and even longer home thanks to some fallen power lines just out of Gympie. But for the price it was worth the drive. Wooden stand, 12 2ft tanks, 4ft sump, lights, sump pump, some media and all plumbing for a crazy price of $300!!! Only problem is that I have no room until I buy a house at the end of the year. So this will sit at dads house until then. All 13 tanks went into the cruiser and the stand into the trailer. Few pics of the car and trailer Will be changing it around a little bit. Not to keen on the way the sump is set up so will be changing that. White paint will come off and redone in black. Currently the top tanks feed to the bottom tanks then to the sump and pump back up to the top so that will be changed. Will have another 3 tanks next to the sump that will run separately. Depending on how big the shed will be maybe another 6 tanks on top. Re-enforce the stand. Take out the fluros for some LED's. Thats it for the moment I think. Will be updating when I change things around. If you guys have any idea's for it don't be shy! This will be my first shrimp system. Cheers Zac

I think its perfect location but the height needs to be a bit smaller so its not POW!!!!!!!

I like it. Just need more ppl to leave feedback?

I love this new feature! This makes it easier to identify potentially dodgy people and very easy to find respected sellers with a good track record. Thank you NoGi??

@ineke @NoGi @neo-2FX @OzShrimp I think it's great to be so readily viewable. Does this then wipe our other reputation points system away?

I never get feedback :(

Can only comment on the dennerli. They have different requirements than most caridinas but i dont think they are harder. I feed mine a variety of foods that i also feed my other shrimps with. I dont use special rock or substrate but i use the 7.5 sulawesi salt. Considering the way they are collected and the rough travels the wild caught ones have to go through, if they were that sensitive we wouldnt have them in our tanks...

So this morning I checked my ph its down to around 6.8 now :) and my nitrite is now down to 0.25ppm, 5.0ppm Tomorrow I'll do a water change using RO and hopefully within a few days it will be shrimp ready :D

I follow two ideas based on my conversations with other breeders on this issue - when numbers are small (say ten shrimp total), I limit the number of males to one or two with 8 females, and then cull all the male offspring and leave the females to build up the numbers of the colony. When colony is larger, I have a couple of really good males with lots of good females, then cull the offspring when they reach around 10mm, but you can already tell apart individuals with really good grades and really bad grades by this stage. I cull anything that doesn't reach a high grade (see SKF standard guides) and select only a few individuals to remain with the colony. The remaining high grade shrimp get sold. This might be seen as a bit hardlined - why don't I also sell/give away the mid and low grade shrimp and just cull the culls? The reason is simple. Shrimp breeders have a responsibility to maintain the quality of the shrimp in Australia. Selling lower grade shrimp means that lower grade shrimp will be bred more often, leading to a downward spiral in the quality of shrimp available in Aus. Case in point, has anyone seen the quality of common red cherries lately? The top breeders stopped breeding them to move onto more lucrative/difficult shrimp, so every man and his dog started breeding with no consideration for quality, and now you are hard pressed to find anything even close to high grade. most stuff you see in shops are, at best, low grades and mostly culls with so little red you could barely call them red cherries. Now some people might suggest that you can give low and mid grades away with the understanding that they won't be bred or sold. Unfortunately there are very few people who I completely trust in the hobby and they breed for quality anyway.