Shrimp In The Filter

[blinky000]

After getting 10 cherry shrimp from a member of this board only yesterday, I woke up this morning to find 3 left. Disappointed, I assumed my betta had eaten them, though he didn't look any fatter and there wasn't any evidence of them laying on the floor of the tank. It also crossed my mind that it was completely out of character for him to do something like that and figured I knew Steve better than that. Throughout the day, I kept checking in the tank, moving things, ruffling moss carpets desperately trying to find any more shrimp but to no avail.

This evening, I heard this god awful noise that had been going on for about half an hour. I assumed it was a helicopter hovering above the house but it turned out that it was the filter in the other room. I switched it off intending to clean out the impeller, went upstairs to get a bucket and came back downstairs to find 3 live shrimp on the bottom of the tank. I thought the ones I put in temporary accommodation earlier were playing silly buggers and jumped out again but they were still in there, so the new ones must have come out of the filter after I switched it off. I took the sponges out and sure enough, there they all were, even the teeny little one.

The filter is a Tetra in400 so it's got this compartment thing on the bottom. They've gone into it through here:

And end up chilling in here (yes, those are rogue snails in there):

So now I don't know what to do. Do I just leave them to do their thing or shall I cover it with a stocking? Would it do them more hard than good keeping them out of their "safe area"?

 

[Aqua Marine]

I had a similar experience with small fry and ended up putting some netting across the filter suckers which stopped them being sucked in. The downside of this is that the net gets clogged up very quickly and therefore requires fairly regular maintenance to keep the flow regular!

 

[blinky000]

This filter gets clogged so regularly anyway, thanks to all the snails going in there as babies and then growing up

 

[Mowbz]

Mine do the same in my U2. As there is only one "outlet" on at a time, they crawl inside the unused one and sit in the bottom of the filter. I dred to think if any have gone through the impellor (havent seen any chopped up bits!) but they seem to like it in there!