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It has a lot of red things in it... It's a 20long (75.7 liters?) And somewhat new. I made a three day move a couple of months back, and decided I'd rather get a new tank than try to transport the old one. Brought two buckets of water with me, along with some fish a gajillion sword plants. (Those started as just two or three, and somehow multiplied into...many), and an anubias I got a month or two before moving. It currently has 9 cherry barbs (7 female, and two males) 1 female bristlenose pleco and 10 very very red cherry shrimp Unfortunately can't really remember the exact names of most of the other plants, but I've been adding them to the tank for a couple of months. They are all medium/low light plants that are supposed to be easy to care for. The shrimp and the male cherry barbs are actually brand new as of today. The barbs were very excited to meet. The shrimp also appear to be doing well so far...they've only been in there about two hours, so I'm still holding my breath. They move around a lot more in my tank than they did at the store, so I guess they like it here, or at least there is more for them to nom on.

About 3mm in length. The light flecks in the water is the best timed green water outbreak I could have wished for! The green colour of the body suggests they might be eating it too so its all fingers crossed for some post-larval juvenile settlement.

As Jarad said. We'd love to hear any tales and see any pics you may wish to share. Thanks for saying gday. I love the term "vagrant pond snails" for some reason that made me laugh !

Welcome to SKF@watercrayfish Please do share with us if you keep any inverts. Always love pix! Crays are awesome.

Hello, I have had an aquarium for a while, and grew up around them (my dad has always kept african cichlids...but I'm pretty happy just sticking to my cherry barbs, bristlenose pleco, and a pile of aquatic plants). I've never had shrimp before, but I decided to get some cherries a couple of months ago cause they're pretty interesting to watch. Haven't gotten them yet (gonna get them tomorrow actually) Since I've never kept any kind of invert other than vagrant pond snails I did a lot of research before deciding if it'd even be ok to get them. This is pretty much the only place on the internet I could find information that is reliable and well organized, so it seemed like a good place to sign up in case I ever need help, or simply want to share about my shrimp. And that's my introduction, I'm not sure that I'll be especially active but I figured I'd give a proper hello at least!

Have been adding a few more tanks, 24 running at the minute hope to rearrange a bit to be able to fit another 4. Probably not the prettiest set up but the shrimps dont seem to mind !

I think you need more girls in your tank! Bloody fantastic

These are just in the tank with the parents and its a bit of a test to see if they can make it in just the fresh water. the collection site is not far upstream from the Patterson River estuary so its quite possible they need a bit of salt... but we'll see. The Wimmera R. Paratya are certainly bigger now, some saddled and I have seen one berried but not close enough to see egg size. The Wimmera R. is landlocked but does have a lot of salty groundwater intrusions. In general salinity is EC < 2000 µS/cm so I'm expecting them to breed well in fresh. My aim with the Paratya is to first prove they breed for me in a tank before I move them to ponds outside and see how well they do through next winter. I've gone a bit nuts on ebay buying tubs and ponds lately...

A trick we use to cull snails is to leave a fish net in a bucket of aquarium water. Outside if possible. Few days later the net will have a nice biofilm on it. If the net is then added to an aquarium, snails will swarm all over it. Net can then be removed, the snails shaken off and the process repeated. Perhaps netting would be a good medium for growing shrimp biofilm food?

Great photos and article mate!

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That was an awsome read, love those pics and? I'm off to buy a camera lol

amazing pics dude, feel free to share as many as you want! its like shrimp porn ?

Beautiful shots, love the pic of the molt stands out in the crowd of many other impressive shrimp shots. Well done thanks for sharing.

There are better sources of biofilm. I've noticed that there is a particular slime that grows on silicon air lines when they are new that is thick and slimy and often gets a pink colour to it like your photo ^. It seems to me that the cheaper the air line, the thicker the sludge. I assume there is something leaching from the hose wall that is fuelling a bacterial feeding frenzy. I normally wipe it off with a tissue and after a couple of weeks and it stops coming back. This stuff I wouldn't feed to shrimp. I do feed them the algae (biofilm) that grows on the underside of my glass covers under the lights by scraping the glass with a credit card and washing in the tank. It cleans the glass and feeds the shrimp - win win.

Soo... I've got a pump that I've attached tubing to in order to split the output (2 section tank + 2 breeder boxes). The tubing very quickly develops some nice brown gunk... Is it biofilm? Should I dump it into the tanks or is it better not to? (I call it my hexapus because it's got 6 outlets, as in "Ahhh the hexapus ate my tubing!")

An opportunity arose and I couldn't say no... This new tank has only been set up for a couple of weeks prior to getting shrimp, but all the contents (rocks, plants, moss) have come from mature tanks rich in biofilm. Only the glass is clean and thin inert sand layer is fresh. Same size as before ~50 litres. The day before the shrimp arrived I swapped the sponge filter for a mature filter from another tank. Not maturing the tank properly for a month or more is a risk but whatareyagunnado. I did consider removing all the shrimp from another mature tank but then discovered there were Paratya larvae in the water I wanted to keep. So new tank with old contents it had to be. Since the sand is clean - I'm temporarily adding some grotty potted plants in slimy plastic pots from other tanks to supply more biofilm and the shrimp are quickly finding them and cleaning them (small amazon sword bottom pic). The water this time around is pure rainwater from 100KL storage (so water params should be relatively stable) with a constant drip in and out (about 3 litres of 50 litres replaced each day) = ~30% water change per week. KH <1, GH<1, pH ~6.0 22C. I drip acclimatised the shrimp to the rainwater over a 2 day period with no losses. Colours are bright and I'm optimistic. I followed @fishmosy's lead and bought some Boss aquaria shrimp snow to try as a supplemental feed and a test of a just a few flakes brought more interest from the shrimp than I've seen from the zebs before for other foods. .

I have a mature filter from my fish tank, will do it right away! Thanks a lot!

I just went through this problem too with DAS who discovered suicide. I went to Bunnings and got some acrylic/Perspex sheet and cut it to size. I think it was roughly $50 which I thought was expensive but was desperate at the time because I was losing shrimp every night. I also noticed it was at night that they were jumping. I'm not sure how I'm going to go about having fans on it as well, maybe I'll just slide the acrylic forward a bit to leave a bigger gap which I'm hoping will be enough for fan air to go through but could be problem which I'm thinking through now for best approach. Here's some photos of what it looks like. And one of my other tanks which needed some customisation because of the light and hoses. It's not the greatest but has worked for me. I haven't noticed anymore jumpers.

I find the shrimp will actually use the airlines and heater cables to climb out. The easiest way to stop that is to make a collar on the lines. You can use a piece of plastic, or tape the lines so the shrimp can't climb but the easiest thing to use is a bread bag tag. They fit neatly onto the airline and heater cable, they aren't too big and unsightly but you do notice them. Also keep your water a bit lower as the shrimp can climb up the glass using the algae . I often see shrimp grazing above the water line. i do have glass lids so I leave the back one on all year round - the fans can still cool the water - I tape the gaps all around the back glass and rarely lose shrimp that way now. My Tibees used to always go walkabout!

There are no hard and fast rules for this because each tank is different - just like every biofilm is different due to differences in the organisms that make it up. there are, however, some things you can do to boost growth before adding shrimp. One easy thing you can do is to boost the daylength - as in run your lights for as long as you can, 12-18hrs works well. You can also dose fertilisers to boost algae growth, although this can sometimes promote the growth of hair algae rather than beneficial algae - e.g. greenspot and diatoms. Some shrimp will eat hair algae so it all depends on which shrimp you plant to keep. Regardless, I f adding fertiliser, you will need to do large water changes before adding shrimp to get water parameters to where they need to be, (e.g. Very low nitrates). The final thing you can do is to give the tank plenty of time to mature. On occasion I have let tanks sit without shrimps for 3 or 4 months to mature and develop a nice coating of biofilm.