Amano Shrimp

I thought you said your aquarium photography skills weren't that good - what a great pic of the shrimp and the cories.

Very interesting to read of your shrimps' behaviour. Lots of "shrimp" people on here who will hopefully be able to share / answer from their experiences.

What's the variety of grass you have growing Anne? Is it vallis?

Fiona, according to the label the grass is Sagittaria subulia, the pot had several plants so I separated them before planting, it's been in the tank for 15 months now and is trimmed regularly as it can grow quite tall.  It puts out underground runners from which new plants grow, I am frequently removing them or there would be no sand for the cories to sift through. Most importantly the label said easy, which is how I choose all my plants when I set up my first and only  tank January 15.

Sue, the shrimp have always been at that temperature I even bought them from the temperate tank at my LFS.  I suppose in the summer the tank gets hotter due to the room temperature but it's still pretty cold in the North East at the moment so that can't be affecting the tank.

Maybe my shrimp are just special 

I thought Amano shrimps only reproduced in brackish water? I think the reality is that these shrimps are just collected from the wild and labelled "Amano" whatever the species. Identifying shrimps, even European ones, requires microscopic examination and detailed knowledge. I strongly suspect that there are numerous species involved, perhaps collected in a wide variety of places, which would explain different behaviours and requirements.

Pictures aren't really very useful for identifying invertebrates. I make my living identifying insects, spiders and other inverts, both on land and in freshwater. There are very few species that can be identified from photos and the internet is full of incorrectly labelled photos, and those are of British species which are probably the most well-studied in the world. The tropical situation is very much worse.

Even fish aren't necessarily correctly identified. Corydoras "julii" is one of the commonest "species" offered for sale but the vast majority of those are actually C. trilineatus. I have a book "Aqualog All Corydoras" and there are numerous species there that are so far unnamed, but very similar to known species. Many of these are just given C numbers. These species are often so similar to known species that you could easily buy some which were labelled as a known species but are not in fact that species. Fish have been much better studied than shrimps or snails, but there are still many problems of identification.

Snails are particularly difficult, most of those found accidentally in aquaria could have come from anywhere in the world. There are aquatic snails now found abundantly in the wild in the UK which have been introduced from somewhere unknown and nobody has yet been able to identify them so the chances of identifying snails in a pond or aquarium from photos is zero. Incidentally, the small "pest" snails commonly found in tanks are NOT "pond snails" as commonly stated. The species usually called pond snail here is Lymnaea peregra a.k.a. the wandering snail which is much bigger, although it does have the same general shape.

I wasn't totally convinced by my identification of the pond snails but they don't eat plants and do eat algea so they are stayers.  They may multiply a bit but the availability of food regulates their numbers and the tank isn't covered in sesame seeds, though not as pretty as nerites.

So basically Richard, there are lots of invertabrates and fish out there that look and in some cases behave similarly that we don't always know what we are getting, interesting and confusing.

Also illustrates the problems with using English names and why we always use the scientific names.

The little ones in my tanks are all sinistral and definitely Physidae. There are only two native species of Physidae in the UK, but in ponds the ones found are aliens, generally believed to have come from North America, though they've been here for a couple of hundred years. They are all much bigger than the ones generally found in aquariums which I assume are tropical. I've found that if I have a lot of MTS in a tank, the little ones tend to disappear, maybe they can't compete.

Tomorrow I'm going out with a couple of  staff and a group of volunteers from the local Wildlife Trust to show them how to do pond surveys for invertebrates. It will be interesting to see what snails we find. I have some of the very large Great Pond Snail Lymnaea stagnalis in my cold water UK tank and I'm often tempted to try one in a tropical tank to see how they go. They are quite impressive (up to 50 mm) and very good at clearing up debris (including dead fish!).

we don't always know what we are getting, interesting and confusing.

same with plants, my supposed amazonia frogbit being a case in point! If the seller doesnt know for sure what they're selling and we don't know..... I do recall seeing straight spiral vallis advertised by one ebay seller, which did make me chuckle