Zoidburg,
Thank you again for helping. I wasn't very clear on my feeding. When I first introduced the shrimp, most were not finding the food, so I only fed them every third day. Once the adults learned where I was putting their food, I feed them once per day. I normally don't clean the back glass in my tanks, and let whatever critters are contained snack on the algae,, diatoms, and bio film between meals. The shrimp have cut the algae growth on the back of the tank by by at least half in the last 2 weeks. I'm now feeding them 2 tiny pellets once per day that are about 2mm in size. They are formulated for inverts without using copper sulfate as a preservative and are made from a mix of fish meal and vegetables for a balanced diet. They dissolve into a power after about a minute in the water. The adults and the tiny ones were both chowing down today when I watched them with the magnifying glass.
I'll get a better look at the flatworms when I see another. If I determine they are Planaria, thanks for the O2 advice. Because of heart problems and sleep apnea, I use a O2 concentrator with my CPAP when sleeping. I have an extra O2 concentrator that I bought to have in case the one I use were to break. If I decide I have Planaria and need to dose the tank, I'll hook the spare O2 concentrator up to air stone and stick it in the tank for a couple of weeks. Since it won't be under pressure nor the water temp fluctuating, I won't have to worry about supersaturation. Some people use these O2 concentrator with pressurized bio-reactor chambers, which can lead to supersaturation and gas bubbles damaging a fish's gills and blood vessels.
I've got a big capacity for bio filtration, with 10 pounds of ceramic rings and 600 cubic inches of poly fiber padding. I had tricked the tank out so that it should be able to handle up to 1000 adult shrimp ultimately. For the tank's current day to day bio load , the soccer ball sized sponge pre-filter I'm using is probably adequate until my colony develops. Before ordering my shrimp, I had kept 6 glolight tetras from my fish tank in this one for a month to give the new tank plenty of time to cycle. I also used the dirty sponge pre-filter from the fish tank to seed the new tank's bio filtration. In short. I've got massive overkill for bio filtration at this point.
What I love most about my new filter I bought for this tank, is that the water is so well aerated inside the filter, so the microbes can break down ammonia and nitrites super quickly. For many years I used canister filters made from 5 gallon buckets filled with bio media, but the problem with them is that the bacteria can strip the water of O2 when they're given enough nutrients to feed upon, as you rightly warned. This new filter is a miniature version of a Bakki shower used for koi ponds, which not only strip waste by-products from the water, but also return water that is better oxygenated than when it enters the filter. Its only downside compared to canisters is that they can provide nitrate breakdown when used in a series with low water flow rates. I've got my trusty Pothos as well as Aponogeton Ulvaceus, Jungle Vallisneria, and Hornwort inside the tank to suck up nitrates, so I don't need any denitrification from the bio filter microbes.
The reason for my initial post to the forum was that I'm using a 400+ gph pump that turns over the tank's water 8 times per hour. While I was planning the configuration of this tank, I've also been putting together filtration plans for a 30,000 gallon koi pond. I'm converting an old in ground concrete swimming pool to a koi pond. Swimming pool filters and bio filtration are very different so I've had some work to do to get filtration set up beforehand. Based upon my research, the filter setup for my shrimp tank would theoretically handle nearly 2 pounds of fish, which produce more waste than shrimp. Doing my planning for both projects at the same time, led me to sort of overkill on filtration for the tank.
I've been planning to post a comment about my new filter in the product review forum. After I bought mine, a guy in the UK who posted a YouTube review of it saying that it was the first filter he had ever seen which was so perfect he could not think of anything he would want to change, which has been my reaction as well.
The funny thing is that I've kept fish for so long that keeping good tank and water conditions is second nature to me, but I'd never kept shrimp before. I knew about freshwater crayfish, but I didn't know there were freshwater shrimp other than the freshwater cousins of brine shrimp that live in seasonal pools. I was originally planning for this tank to have large schools of neon tetra and pygmy cory catfish. While researching plants, I kept seeing the pics of RCS and decided to get them instead, without realizing how different they were from fish in many ways. For example with my fish tanks, flat worms were just live fish food that was quickly devoured. I had never worried about them before or ever seen any in my tanks. Then I read today that the slime Planaria leave on a surface is toxic to baby shrimps.
The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know.
Greg