I have a couple newer tanks of OEBT variants at the moment with black sand as their substrate.  So far, while I do water changes, I have not yet siphoned the sand itself.  My thought on this is that as long as nitrates do not rise, the decomposition of the shrimp waste will serve as food for the tanks' plants and potentially lead to growing greater amounts of the shrimp's food.  My nitrates are testing at or around zero, so the breakdown of wastes is not exceeding the plants' uptake of the nutrients.  

My question is, should I siphon the tanks' substrate to assist in aerating it and avoiding unhealthy bacteria, or is it not necessary to do so?  I have heard that putting in some trumpet snails can take care of the needed aeration of sand; is this something that you would recommend?  If siphoning is needed, what siphons do you use to do so without worrying about sucking up all the relatively fine substrate and the young shrimp?  Thank you all very much for your input!

Do NOT add trumpet snails.... Unless you Love the sight of them ;)

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Haha - thanks for the recommendation.  Would you recommend, though, any kind of siphoning or agitation of the sand substrate?

It is not necessary. Shrimp do not produce that much waste.

A good mix of plants, snails and shrimp will remove/reduce the need to gravel clean. I've never siphoned the gravel in any of my tanks and my shrimp do just fine. If you do decide to siphon, just don't disturb too much otherwise you risk a spike in amonnia if I am remembering correctly.

I should add that if you read through the recent breeder interviews, gravel vacuuming was mentioned a few times. Good practice even with Shrimp soils. Can help water quality. I didn't do my benibachi for a few years and was quite surprised when I did vac it just how much detritus was in there.

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Would that be because they aren't using a moderately (or higher) planted tank?

I'd be too scared of siphoning up shrimplets and as @NoGi states the ammonia spike and possibly all other parameters would be too high as well for some time. If you need to do this try it out with a tank of cherries they, or should I say mine, are pretty hardy and forgive me constantly for not treating them like my CRS. 

For me it originates from having planted tank freaks as being my mentors when I first got serious about aquariums. But that was a long time ago.

These days with the shrimp scene becoming more popular, you'll notice that a lot of breeders have a more minimalist style tank preferring moss and other less demanding plants in there and these tend to be tied/glued down to objects rather than straight into the substrate. So it also kinda makes sense why they would vacuum their substrate as the circle of life isn't as circular as in a planted tank.

Well, that's my baseless theory anyway. Sounded right in my head.  

5 hours ago, NoGi said:

For me it originates from having planted tank freaks as being my mentors when I first got serious about aquariums. But that was a long time ago................ So it also kinda makes sense why they would vacuum their substrate as the circle of life isn't as circular as in a planted tank.

Well, that's my baseless theory anyway. Sounded right in my head.  

We also prefer the planted tanks as with the above we have been at this for many moons. When starting with shrimp we decided to maintain plants with all our shrimp as well, with the only difference in our CRS tank is more types of wood and eliminating rock to maintain constant parameters. Our CRS are in a 190 litre tank and Cherries are in no less than 130 litre tanks. We also have a controlled lot of ? pond snails ? which don't touch the plants, too much and also clean the scraps.