Louie

Hungle,

                Koi are very big in my area. A family like 4 blocks from here has a big koi pond that extends from the side of their house under their fence and in to the front yard .

      I would have thought to hot for koi 7 months a year but they seem to fair well .

featherblue,

                      Very nice . A very pretty shrimp . I think they come in several patterns?   I have never kept them , have kept cleaner and harlequin but did not breed any as far as raising babies, though the harlequin pair did mate now and than .

 Do you keep your shrimp with corals or anemones ?  I think sexy shrimp in the wild are found in anemones but heard in captivity they do not need it and will fair well even with hardy mushrooms.

Doc,

          The top shrimp is very pretty , I suspect difficult with them is an under statement , lol.

I read about them they seem to have a incredibly high death rate.

Soothing,

                     If you can do freshwater shrimp you can do salt .  A friend has a 20 gallon long ,74 degrees (room temp) ,filtered with only an emperor 280 filter and it is thriving with 10lbs live rock flame scallops (they don't like it over 78) assorted Atlantic cucumbers, starfish , hermits , Atlantic local feather dusters , non pointy urchins and shrimp .

Like Doc said a skimmer is also great but he just does weekly small water changes .

I might do one like his but would add a pair of Catalina gobies.  I kept salt years ago the archaic way with UG filters and they did well .  The diversity of inverts is what I loved .

My harlequins bred a few times but I was never able to get the babies to grow .  I know there are articles on breeding other common marine shrimp but that seems like a BIG pain.

I feed diff food 2 to 3 times a week , Tanks are all heavy planted so they eat 'plant stuff' .

What I do use is Borneo Wild Shrimp Shield which I use during water changes .  I could be wrong but I see a lot more babies due to it .

My first tank was a saltwater tank decades ago . the one thing I was always told be the pet store which I still follow to this day with my freshwater shrimp is after rinsing the chemical media (back in those days they only had chemi-pure) is to than let it sit 24 hours in a container of tank water because most media will change the PH for the first 18 hours .

Not much ever slightly but enough to stress some inverts . Granted in a smaller tank worse than larger tank.

Reading the posts I see many do not do this and never had any problems but this is the method I use to be safe.

There are a few places here that sell cherry shrimp , they breed them all year long outside and water stays warmer than 76 for most of the year .

Soothing,

                 I see an invert Marine tank in your future . Feather dusters , urchins, assorted shrimp , diff types starfish .

ctaylor,

Well they certainly are very pretty , I have only seen them in pictures, They do seem to vary in color .

I had Triops as a kid but would never keep them with shrimp , Adult triops will kill shrimp.

By themselves or with daphnia they are neat but don't live that long.

Thank you both great site but had no idea illegal to sell/buy over state lines.

Oblong, why did you stop carrying them?

Has anyone kept Spixi snails and what has been your experience with them as far as being shrimp safe and keeping them with moss?

Thanks

Liberty,

              I asked Han if he could make filter guards for my Penguin filters . The intake is "squarish" . Either way I received them and as you stated they fit to a glove , well made . He is a master craftsman .

Removing and rinsing the sponge so that baby shrimps would not get sucked up was a big pain , BIG difference with Han's shrimp guard.

mayphly,

                   Very pretty tank. What are those plants on the bottom that carpet your substrate?

Camaro,

                I have used CO2 and no longer do. You can have great planted tanks without it and does not have to be low light at all. Fast growing hardy plants like vals, water sprite, ludwiga and many others take off very nicely with the correct water or even a lower light tank of just driftwood with assorted jave type mosses ,anubias and other mosses is also very pretty and once they get going they grow great.

I purchased Java moss from Han think about a month ago for a 20 gallon driftwood piece and this week it is sending out roots and new plants.

 My biggest tank I ran co2 but when I switched it to a shrimp tank, I stopped . The plants stopped growing daily and I did lose red color in some plants but other than that after a month they all kept on growing (not as fast) .  I only use regular black gravel or small river type round gravel nothing special.

Weekly water changes are big with me and the plants love them.  I do not use any plant additives.

I think the failures with shrimp and CO2 have been in DIY system which you can't control the bubbles or running to much with the more advanced systems.

Doc,

           Yes they were cool and very pretty . The only drawback was that they only ate starfish but I used to go to the beach and get sand stars which were on the piers wood and throw one in their tank every month . I even had babies but unlike freshwater shrimp, none ever made it .

Back than there were no freshwater shrimp around .

Lol oh you thought I had the harlequin Sulawesi .

I have never seen them other than pics and from reading about them they seem harder than the starfish eating marine harlequins I had 20 plus years ago.

Great deals , killies can become 'addictive' just like shrimp.

The filter pad I leave alone . I just drop the bag of either purigen or chemi-pure in the filter behind the filter pad . They come in a mesh bag.

I do let it sit a full 24 hours in a container with tank water so the media absorbs the tank water BEFORE going in filter in shrimp tank.

The reason I do this is because years ago when I had saltwater inverts . The pet store owner told me that sometimes chemical media will fluctuate ph for a few hours if added immediately to the tank instead of letting it sit 24 hours prior in tank water.

In a bigger tank it will not matter but one of my tanks back than was a 10 gallon long with Harlequin shrimp and that was how I added the chemi-pure (not sure if Purigen was around in 80s).

My shrimp tanks are now 20 gallons (other than 1 bigger tank) so I stick with this method.

Amazing video thanks

Doc,

        I do not replace the filter pad in my penguin filters , I only rinse them out but again I drop a bag of the above in each filter and change that every 4 months .

I use either Purigen or chemi-pure in everyone of my filters but when it comes to shrimp tanks, after rinsing out the media under cold tap water, I let it sit in a glass of tank water 24 hours before using it.

I see. I have never seen it happen in my smaller tank , in my bigger planted tank it is impossible to count the shrimp.

I imagine the trap works by luring the planaria in there with bait , than you remove the trap/planaria and re-bait?

Why would you want to get rid of planaria?

I would think most planted tanks and tanks with driftwood are going to have planaria here and there.