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SIP, my big momma shrimp, mother of colonies. Establishing first colony is hard!

seangee said:
When I switched to RO I changed 20% daily for a week and then switched to 75% once a week. Doesn't have to be daily - I'm not very patient. Your rainwater sounds perfect for a betta and the otos. You would have to think about "creating" similar water when we have a long dry period and there is no rainwater.
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Sorry, more questions! I have a bag of aquarium sand, planning to use it in this second tank at some point. Never used sand before, but I think even with rinsing (urgh, not looking forward to that!) that sand will make the water super cloudy and need a lot of water changes and filtering with floss before doing much else to it, is that right?

I do have spare rinsed gravel I could use, but would rather use the sand. Makes sense to set it up the way I want it while it's empty rather than rush it and try to rescape later. Plus otos would probably prefer sand. Will it take a few days of running fishless and lots of water changes before fish can go in? Argh, plus agae! I cleaned and scraped the tank after the last batch of guppies went to the store, it's way too spotless for the otos yet. Although I can bring some algae coated plants, gravel and maybe even the sponge filter over to the 'new' tank though, plus feed the usual algae wafers and veg. Cycling isn't a problem, I keep the filters for that tank running on the other tanks when it's empty, but it won't be a fully established tank I guess. Maybe I could run the lights for a longer time period to hasten algae growth.

OMG. Then I'm going to have to catch up otos. In a densely planted tank. With other fish and shrimp getting in the way. Wish me luck!
 
AdoraBelle Dearheart said:
I am thinking of gradually phasing out the guppies. Much as I love them, dealing with constant fry is a lot of work, and limited space forces some choices. Will keep some special favourites and let them retire and live our their lives, while all fry go to LFS. Once guppy numbers are down, I can think of converting one of the tanks to a betta home. Nice planted 15 gallon should make for a happy betta :)
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15 gallon tank is even better :wub: I feel you, livebearers are literally kid machines :rofl: Though, my ones aren't that prolific.
 
AdoraBelle Dearheart said:
Sorry, more questions! I have a bag of aquarium sand, planning to use it in this second tank at some point. Never used sand before, but I think even with rinsing (urgh, not looking forward to that!) that sand will make the water super cloudy and need a lot of water changes and filtering with floss before doing much else to it, is that right?

I do have spare rinsed gravel I could use, but would rather use the sand. Makes sense to set it up the way I want it while it's empty rather than rush it and try to rescape later. Plus otos would probably prefer sand. Will it take a few days of running fishless and lots of water changes before fish can go in? Argh, plus agae! I cleaned and scraped the tank after the last batch of guppies went to the store, it's way too spotless for the otos yet. Although I can bring some algae coated plants, gravel and maybe even the sponge filter over to the 'new' tank though, plus feed the usual algae wafers and veg. Cycling isn't a problem, I keep the filters for that tank running on the other tanks when it's empty, but it won't be a fully established tank I guess. Maybe I could run the lights for a longer time period to hasten algae growth.

OMG. Then I'm going to have to catch up otos. In a densely planted tank. With other fish and shrimp getting in the way. Wish me luck!
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Resulting cloudiness depends on how well you rinse in my experience. Its not essential to rise to the point that it's clear, its personal preference whether you're patient enough to wait for it to settle/filter.
I filled probably 1/3 of a bucket with sand and left a hose running, one where you can adjust the flow and have a fairly strong jet to agitate the sand. Leave it running and the smaller particles tend to run out over the top of the bucket.. but yeh, good luck!
 
mbsqw1d said:
Resulting cloudiness depends on how well you rinse in my experience. Its not essential to rise to the point that it's clear, its personal preference whether you're patient enough to wait for it to settle/filter.
I filled probably 1/3 of a bucket with sand and left a hose running, one where you can adjust the flow and have a fairly strong jet to agitate the sand. Leave it running and the smaller particles tend to run out over the top of the bucket.. but yeh, good luck!
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Thank you for the tip! My hose can do that, so I will definitely give it a thorough rinse! I don't really need to panic and rush to move the fish immediately anyway. They've been okay for nine months, another couple of weeks while I make sure the tank is set up how I want it and how they would prefer it won't make a difference.

Will need to get some more sand anyway, I only have one small bag, and doubt it will be enough. Also want to go to the LFS to look for more hardscape, so can get more sand then :) Will probably make a new thread when it's ready for re-scaping, and show progress :)
 
AdoraBelle Dearheart said:
I've had a rough time since starting my first tank last June/July. Heater blowing a fuse (three times!) broken air pump, lots of guppy fry born, some losses, battle with ich and later with worms, guppy fry getting sucked into canister filter (but most surviving!), filter output flooding my floor and draining half my tank... it's been a steep and often stressful learning curve.

Long post ahead, I'm sorry. I'd like to keep a record of my shrimp keeping progress. Re-visited my tank logs to remind myself how long it took to finally get a shrimp colony established.

My main tank is a 15 gal guppy/oto community tank, heavily planted. 20-25% water change every 10-14 days, has a small canister filter and a double sponge filter that has bio-media compartments. Nine adult guppies, several babies which get moved to a grow out tank periodically, and seven otocinclus.

8th July 2019: First fish added after a seeded, planted cycle. Heavily planted because I knew I'd want shrimp. I let the tank establish for a while and kept adding new plants now and then.

October 3rd, 2019. First batch of shrimp. Three red cherries, two blue diamonds. I lost one by the next day, but the others seemed to be doing okay, but lost more sporadically, without knowing why.

2nd of January 2020: I only had one shrimp left, a blue male.

January 9th 2020: I got a batch of five red cherry shrimp. I felt like I was failing at shrimp keeping, and questioned whether I should get more, but I felt bad for the lone remaining blue boy, and wanted to give him some company, and give it another try. Lost one by the next day, others survived for months, but no breeding, then would lose one now and again, for unknown reasons, again. They didn't die off all at once, would just lose one one month, then another a month later sort of thing.

1st Feb 2020: One big female looked berried to me, but never saw any babies.

18th Feb 2020: That last blue shrimp died, some red cherries remaining.

16th March 2020: Lost another red cherry, still had two large (female?) and two smaller, less red (males?) red cherries. No signs of berrying or babies.

3rd May 2020: I rescaped the tank a little, and could only find one large and one smaller red cherry shrimp. Looked like a big female and a male. Still no breeding, so I decided I wasn't knowledgeable enough for shrimp keeping yet, and that I wouldn't get any more until I'd figured out why my tank wasn't working for them.

Success!!!



29th May 2020- Stopped breathing when I looked in the tank... a small red shrimp! Not one of the adult pair, I couldn't believe it! Spent so long hunting for more, final count was five young shrimp, plus the two parents. Was over the moon that I finally had babies, eight months after I first added shrimp! Weekly gravel vac/water change becomes even more challenging, with careful syphoning into white buckets and checking for baby shrimp to rescue before dumping the water. Luckily, saving guppy fry from water changes has trained me well, but baby shrimp are even more challenging to avoid and to spot in the bucket!

15th June 2020: Shrimp explosion! Relatively. Counted around 12 young shrimp, plus the parents. Did they just colour up enough/get big enough to come out of hiding, for me to be able to spot them? 14 shrimp is a pretty small colony, but it seemed as though there were shrimp everywhere, when compared to only ever having 4-5 in there before!

27th and 28th of June 2020: Huge re-scape. I wanted to add some more substrate, and move all of the plants, since I had some large plants at the front, smaller plants at the back, and the hornwort and duckweed was taking over the tank. I'd delayed it since finding the baby shrimp, but now they were big enough to avoid, and spot easily in the bucket if they did get sucked up while cleaning the gravel. Set aside two days to move all of the plants to another cycled tank, using the same water from main tank. Deep cleaned the gravel over those two days, moving hiding decor and floating plants to one side of the tank and cleaning the other side one day, then moving them to do the other side the next day.
Slowly added and mixed in more gravel, one small handful at a time, gently nudging shrimp and guppies away from the spot I was working on. Put plants back in, slightly better arranged.

Had a surprise though once I'd removed all of the plants and began gravel vac-ing - tiny, almost completely see through baby shrimp everywhere!! Made the rescape super challenging! Had to carefully syphon into white buckets, nudging shrimp away gently with the syphon, then carefully sifting and netting the removed water and rescuing shrimp from the buckets and putting them back in the tank. They were almost invisible among the mulm too, so had to let things settle and look for movement, rescue, then stir, pour some into a different bucket, wait for that settle, look for movement... the whole process took hours longer than it would have without those tiny shrimp, but I didn't care at all, was so delighted that I finally had lots of babies!

July 2020: Shrimp have put on a lot of growth, some seem to be fully grown, or close to it. Can see saddles and the rounded back end that females have on some of them. Hard to know the number since the tank is so heavily planted, but I can usually count 30 or so without searching too hard, so I think there are between 40-50 shrimp in there now. All from that single large female I had left!

23rd July 2020: I found that big momma original female dead this morning. Far more gutted over losing a shrimp than I ever knew I could be. Looks as though she had some trouble moulting perhaps, can see a line around the mid-section where the moult usually splits. Actually bought to tears when I found her, and will bury her in the garden. I'm very grateful to her though, she gave me my first colony, and I think her daughters will be breeding very soon.
View attachment 110511
One of her daughters, taken this morning.
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Not the clearest photo, sorry, but all the red bits you can see in the gravel are shrimp.

View attachment 110514Pic of main tank, taken yesterday, 22/07/20
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Loved your shrimp saga Adorable.

I'm going to treat myself to a few very soon - I'm really taken with them when I see them in the pet shops.
 
LostBear said:
Loved your shrimp saga Adorable.

I'm going to treat myself to a few very soon - I'm really taken with them when I see them in the pet shops.
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They add so much to the tank, I really think they're worth it! Just have to be so patient, waiting for them to breed. If I were to start again, or start a new colony (I have reds, but would like a blue colony in a different tank at some point) I'd put aside the money until I could spring for 10-20 to begin with. I think starting off with five, then getting another five later, might have slowed things down.
 
:(
I have a berried female!! :hyper:

I knew that some of the females were almost as big as their mom, and getting much deeper colour than before, but I only spotted the first baby on the 29th May! How can they possibly grow up so fast?? I'm finding conflicting info on when they reach breeding age. They couldn't possibly have hidden from me for four months though, and be six months old, can they?? I look at the tank a lot, and tidy up/trim plants, vac the gravel weekly. No way I didn't see them for four months. The second batch are already the size of the first one I saw in May, and they were tiny and almost completely transparent in June.

The first one I spotted wasn't a newborn though. It had already turned red, although not a super bright red like the females are now. I don't know how long they take to colour up, maybe the tiny babies were hiding for that time in the plants? I didn't see any when doing weekly gravel vaccuming, but I wasn't really looking for them either, it had been so long, I wasn't expecting it to happen. I always checked the buckets of water I'd pulled for guppy fry and the larger shrimp, but the tiny shrimpets I saw when I revamped the tank.. I could have easily not seen those. I only saw them when I re-scaped because I'd removed all of the plants and they had no where to hide.

I really hope I didn't accidentally throw out any shrimplets from that first batch :(

Today I was checking on the tank, admiring my wonderful aquascape :cool: and seeing if everyone was okay, and spotted this female. I'm 100% sure she's carrying eggs, because she was upside down inside a broken down almond leaf, and I could see her under belly, and her fanning the eggs! It was a really cool angle to be able to see her from, and actually see the eggs! Of course she'd moved by the time I got the camera.
Here's a couple of photos of some of the other shrimp though, and a bonus oto shot.
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mbsqw1d said:
Congrats!

That oto pic.. I'm becoming quite tempted by them
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Happy to provide more temptation...
Look at the little dudes! Chilling out on an Indian almond leaf in the background, not at all worried that I'm smushed up against the tank snapping photos. Drop an algae wafer in and see the whole school gathered around munching on it - see three of them all lined up in a row on a sword leaf (wish I'd grabbed my camera then,would have been a great shot). They're a lovely little fish.
 
AdoraBelle Dearheart said:
View attachment 110778View attachment 110779View attachment 110780

Happy to provide more temptation...
Look at the little dudes! Chilling out on an Indian almond leaf in the background, not at all worried that I'm smushed up against the tank snapping photos. Drop an algae wafer in and see the whole school gathered around munching on it - see three of them all lined up in a row on a sword leaf (wish I'd grabbed my camera then,would have been a great shot). They're a lovely little fish.
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mbsqw1d said:
They are very cool indeed, I just know theyd love my tank. Off I go reading up about Otos!
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Your gorgeous tank would be lovely for otos. Check the water hardness and other parameters of course, I don't know your water, but the scape! That lovely vall canopy, the little clearing at the front, plenty of little nooks and crannies and spaces to hide in and plants. I can see them fitting in there very well. I've heard of otos and cories schooling together sometimes too, and I think I remember you mentioning the clearing was for the cories. Saw a video clip of an oto pretending to be a panda cory and swimming with them.

I do cultivate and leave the algae to grow on the back wall of the tank for them. I don't know whether I need to, but you read about otos cleaning a tank spotless and then starving to death, especially some wild caught that haven't figured out that algae wafers are food. I'm still trying to get the balance right between enough algae, and "oh my god, my sword is all fuzzy and there's hair algae everywhere.. I just can't deal". But I think you'd be able to balance it better.

This blog post seems to explain why I only saw one new shrimp at the end of May, lost my only female earlier this week, and yet one of those first batch of shrimplets is now a mature berried female already. I keep my tank at 79 F, and shrimp adjust their metabolism according to temperature and food availability. On the colder end, they can take up to six months, but on the warmer, they can reach maturity by two months. But also die younger. The more you know!
petshrimpplanet.com

What Age Can Cherry Shrimp Breed? | Pet Shrimp Planet

In all of my research, I have found a lot of good and useful info on Cherry Shrimp that isn’t difficult to come across but…
petshrimpplanet.com petshrimpplanet.com
.
 
Seriously hair algae is the devil. You described my tank perfectly :good: Its quite how I had it pictured in the mind's eye.. bit more hardscape is needed to give it some height. I have MTS in mine so they're probably clearing up most of any algae (other than the damn hair stuff). So yeh, the Otos would need to be house trained :rolleyes:

I need to pay more attention to my cherry shrimp. They're doing well and ive noticed one or two with eggs, or 'berried' as ive heard you mention. But, ive no idea how many I have, or how many females.. :oops:
 
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