clean-up crew?

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eja206

Aquarium Advice Activist
Joined
Feb 17, 2009
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163
Location
Southampton, UK
this summer i am thinking of starting my first tropical tank (i have had unheated fish tanks for a few years). i was wondering what people suggested for a clean-up crew in a 10 gallon? i have neer kept shrimp or algae eaters or anything to help maintain a clean tank before. i dont want to add too much to the bio-load as it is only 10 gallon, and want to be able to fit some fish in there too! for fishes i was either thinking some livebearers (couple of mollies/platies and some guppies) or a school or tetras of some kind.
any advice would be appreciated! thanks
 
look into a pleco called a bristle nose.. they wont get bigger than 6 inches if you need a cleaner... also a tank that size snails arnt out of the question.. they will help with your algea a little bit.
 
I'd say something like otos for algae and shrimp/cories for eating leftover food.
 
I love my otos. They stay small and do a nice job keeping things clean and they're fun to watch. They can be comical interacting with each other and my platies and betta.
 
Isn't one of the potential problems with otos in a small tank is that they are schooling fish that should be kept in something like groups of five or more?

One of the things I would recommend is amano shrimp. You can have lots of shrimp in a tank, and these are supposed to eat algae. But when I had to get mine, I had to get them through aqua bit.

The other thing is MTS. While some complain that they can take over a tank, others have said the snail population will only increase to the point that food is available and that if you're getting to much of a population explosion then you might be over-feeding your fish.
 
Bioload comes from feeding not from stocking. Obviously stocking affects how much you feed, but generally shrimp can survive in fairly large numbers on detritus and algae alone, so you don't have to increase feeding for them at all. As long as you don't, they don't contribute to the bioload.
 
thanks for all the advice guys! i never knew there were so many contenders for bottom of the tank dwellers! i really like the look of the oto cats, the websites i have looked at don't say either way whether they like to be kept with others of their own kind of not. anyone else with more experience? shrimp look cool too, which type would be best?
p.s. thanks for the info on bio-load - think i was getting confused!
 
thanks for all the advice guys! i never knew there were so many contenders for bottom of the tank dwellers! i really like the look of the oto cats, the websites i have looked at don't say either way whether they like to be kept with others of their own kind of not. anyone else with more experience? shrimp look cool too, which type would be best?
p.s. thanks for the info on bio-load - think i was getting confused!
Cherry Red Shrimp, Yellow Shrimp, Snowball Shrimp are all nice, I prefer the Cherry's but only because of color.

bs6749 has various Shrimp for sale from time to time and they are reported to be excellent quality. here is one of his ad's on here in classifieds http://www.aquariumadvice.com/forums/f25/yellow-shrimp-and-snowball-shrimp-for-sale-108249.html
 
thanks for all the advice guys! i never knew there were so many contenders for bottom of the tank dwellers! i really like the look of the oto cats, the websites i have looked at don't say either way whether they like to be kept with others of their own kind of not. anyone else with more experience? shrimp look cool too, which type would be best?
p.s. thanks for the info on bio-load - think i was getting confused!
i have a single oto for about 2 weeks or so. never really saw him. i'd hav to go on the hunt just to make sure he was still in there. Yesterday I picked up 2 more otos on the advice on quite a few of our members and I've seen more of the 3 of them since yesterday afternoon than I had of the single over 2 weeks. They're all over the tank now chasing each other around, nudging each other on the glass. They're almost acting like my cories with the way they're schooling. TOO cute.
 
I'd say cories and some Cherry's. I absolutely love cories. They are quite the characters... I love when they fart and a little bubble goes floating up. LOL!

Just make sure your tank mates won't eat the shrimp. I had quite a few ghost shrimp at one time and my Diamond Tetras ate them all.
 
I have kept a single otto for quite a long time, he does real well.
Nice to know, because I just added a single otto to my 5 gallon betta tank. I had tried amano shrimp and nerite snails, but it seemed that both were eating the drift wood and making a mess of the sand substraite. I'm hoping the otto will do better. Of course from the looks of how small the one I got is, it would seem I could put three or more in this 5 gallon betta tank.
 
Amanos, red cherry shrimp, yellow shrimp, snowball shrimp, blue pearl shrimp, and some of the Caridina sp. of shrimp like tigers and crystal red shrimp/crystal black shrimp are going to be good algae eaters. Amanos are excellent and the other 4 I listed after that are great as well. Amanos won't reproduce unless you transfer the berried females to a tank with brackish water. For that reason I suggest one of the 4 types of shrimp that I listed after Amanos, that way you will have a colony of algae eating shrimp rather than having to purchase more shrimp when your Amanos eventually die off.

I don't recommend any fish in the tank with shrimp other than ottos. Any fish that CAN fit a shrimp into it's mouth will try. If you have lots of cover in the tank in the form of moss and other plants then I'd say you could add something like Endlers, guppies, tetras, or some other smaller fish. However, since it's a 10g tank I'd steer clear of the Endlers and guppies unless you sold the babies on a regular basis. They like swimming room and thus prefer longer tanks. I recommend a 20L as the smallest tank for them, though you could keep 2 males and 4 females in a 10g if you constantly removed the babies and didn't let the population build.

Most likely there will be SOME shrimp losses due to fish eating them and that's to be expected since the shrimp are about 2mm when they are released from the female's underside. Having 20 or so shrimp in that tank would allow a colony to become established and if moderately planted you wouldn't even notice the losses.
 
I just picked up a 29G tank, and was wondering what kind of clean up crew I can/should add. I'll most likely be keeping a few Catfishes. Will the Catfishes eat shrimps? Besides shrimps, what other ones can I consider? Snails? Also, at 29G, approximately how many can I keep in there safely, without overcrowding? Thanks!
 
I don't know about keeping only one cory, lots of people do it with success. To me though, it is a built in instinct that it seems almost wrong to work against. As for shrimp. I have 3 ghost shrimp and LOVE them. They do practically nothing to the bioload and are constantly eating detrius from the bottom of the tank. One of them even swims up into the palm of my hand every time I put my hand in the tank. Both animals are wonderful to watch and seem to do a really good job keeping my tank clean. They also get along very well in my tank. One eats algae the other detrius so the cleaning crew covers it all.
 
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