Useful Shrimp Forum

I've always used their species descriptions but I must confess to not having used their forum. You'll have to pass on any useful info you learn 

Hmmm, now where I have I seen those photos before 


I suppose in a shrimp only tank that makes sense. Though I'm not sure I'd like to leave all the snail poo sitting on the top of the sand in my shrimp & fish & snail tank.

When I had problems with shrimps a couple of years ago, Natalia told me that shrimp poo grows bugs which are good food for shrimps. I think you still have to do water changes though, and if you feed thinks like courgette which can mess the water you'd have to hoover up any bits that fell off the main slice.

When I got the reply I thought it was worth sharing on here as I knew it would generate an interesting discussion!!

I have to say it feels very alien to be leaving my gravel full of poo (and incredibly hard as I am a bit of a perfectionist!) but thinking about it, I don't hoover my fish gravel more than once a month and my fish are fine (not including the latest debacle with my phantoms!). I only hoovered up the babies because I just couldn't resist giving my moss a little hoover!! 

I'm gonna leave the gravel until I can stand it no more! Then I shall have to do baby shrimp rescue, which incidentally I did by siphoning my bucket of waste water in to a sieve lined with kitchen paper. Any babies were then sucked up with a syringe and deposited in a dish.  I shall continue to do water changes each week at maybe 40%, so slightly bigger than normal and see how we all fare.

FC76

Well, Sebastian at Pro Shrimp didn't let me down. here's his reply:

"I am not surprised there are many different opinions, because a lot of different ways work.
 
Cleaning the substrate yes or no depends a bit.  We don’t clean the substrate at all. If your bacterial environment is healthy they will take care of all this. With too much disturbance of the substrate you sometimes can do more harm than good (releasing gas pockets etc.). If you want to clean your substrate give it a very quick siphon and don’t disturb it too much. This is easier with gravel than with soil. If you have snails in your tank (MTS are great for that), they will help a lot with clearing up surplus food.
 
Water changes often cause massive discussions. Some people advocate to never change and only top up, others do 10% weekly others do up to 40%. First of all, big water changes are not a bad thing at all and shrimp don’t mind it. The key is to match the parameters of the fresh water to the tank, so you don’t have a massive change in parameters in a short time. A 50% water change with well-matched parameters is not a problem for shrimp. Don’t dump the water back in the tank, rather use an airline or a small hose to fill it back in slowly.
 
I am against these ultra-small water changes or top-up only. For one you will exhaust certain trace elements over time if you only top up with RO. Additionally your bacteria count will go up, which can be dangerous in some cases, so a good amount of fresh water is important. Those small water changes often go well for a year, but after that people often experience bacterial infections, unexplained deaths etc. This only works with fantastic over the top filtration. Most people don’t have that.
 
We do 20% weekly changes (a little bit more in highly stocked tanks) and every 3-4 weeks a 30% change. While monitoring TDS and nitrate levels. Top up with RO in between to not raise TDS and GH too much. TDS is a great parameters to judge when a water change is due and you can change the percentage accordingly. Overall 10-40% water changes are fine as long as the parameters are matched and the levels of nitrate and TDS are monitored.
 
 
I hope this made sense."
 
 
Kind regards
Sebastian
 
Sebastian Beneke
Pro Shrimp UK

E-Mail: [email protected]
http://www.pro-shrimp.co.uk

Seb's good, isn't he?
I'm going away for a few days (see my other post – I've got shrimplets too!).
Once I'm back and caught up with things, I'm ordering some crystal red shrimps and 2 of the bloody mary's to increase the redness of my cherry shrimps and freshen up the gene pool because the breeder I got mine from has bred from the same line for ages.
I'll be getting them all from Pro shrimp.