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I did a bit of a CRS cull last night, ditched a heap of males not showing good enough colours. as you can see in the pic of the CRS on the cameroon moss the red part just behind the head hasn't got solid colour and has a faded area. i found a bunch of boys with the same thing and off they went to the 6ft

Hey guys thanks heaps for the input. I've decided to go with the pump and chiller option. Using 2 canisters just seems impractical even if it does increase the flow to an adequate rate to run the chiller properly.. I'll get enough money selling one canister to pay for a quality pump by the sound of it. I actually came across this posted today on gumtree They've said they'd take $150 for it. I'd love to have a refugium setup similar to what you have Jarad. Would this design work for that? I'm hoping to pick it up tonight it is a brand new sump. I think I might just run a single tank for now and setup the other tank as a seperate system with different WP. Will save some time and money no doubt too. Cheers! -edit- not grabbing the sump. Have been learning a bit from Jarad. Will have an update soon once I've figured a few basics out. Will

Yes please I'll pm u

Hooray for the laws of the universe !

Awesome new shrimp I got yesturday

I think its every do able, you should be able to use at least one of the Eheims to run the chiller but it would be cheaper to run a pump i dare say. I have 2 pumps in my sump, one runs to the chiller and the big one that runs the to the tanks.both are in the last chamber and the return from the chiller is pointed at the pick up for the tank so the coolest water goes right to the tanks. There is 1 000 000 different ways to run a sump so depends what you wanna do. i changed min recently and still want to add some stuff but its basically k1 in to marine pure spheres and then i have heaps of void space to add to the total water volume. Im thinking about adding fine filter matt over the spheres to help filter out finer junk in the water The fly screen.... well paul's system seams to work so i would probably try to mimic his set up i forget what he has done with it, its been a while but i personally would run a sponge in each section as well as the sump. return water would be in end furthest away of course so the water passes through the screen. If you wanted you could possibly have a return in to each section to ensure they all get fresh water but that's extra pluming. If both weirs are all ready at the same height your just going to need to put some kind of barrier to stop shrimp falling down it. filter sponge or more fly screen should do the job.

I believe temperature is also a very important factor in growth rate. Warmer = faster (but cooked shrimp do not grow!). My RCS babies seem to double in size for the first time in roughly 2 weeks at 23-24 C. Of course, newborns tend to hide very very well, so the shrimp may be older than you think unless you were going based on something like when the mother was no longer carrying the eggs. I've had Cherries reach maturity in about 4 months, but generally during the summer when it's warmer. My 2-2.5 month old babies are about 6mm at the moment. Keep in mind, I've read that warmer temps and faster growth may lead to a smaller shrimp at maturity as well as the expected shorter lifespan.

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.