Inquiry about amano shrimp/shrimp in general

[dragon14]

Hello! This is my first post in this section of the forum..

Currently we have 8 pygmy (c. pygmaeus) catfish in a cycled 10g freshwater tank, 100w heater, filtered, and we run a bubbler sometimes. Black sand, fake plants.

We are considering getting two Amano shrimp! We know almost nothing about shrimp. We looked at several kinds of shrimp at the lfs, and we like these guys quite a bit. They also had cherry shrimp, but they're tiny! They had some kind of candy shrimp, there was some black phantom shrimp, but we don't really want those only because our sand is black, haha!

Do shrimp breed much? Bio load? Easy to care for?

What we have learned thus far, is that these shrimp would be pretty much at home with the current configuration of our tank as far as water temp and ph goes, so yay! They can get up to about 2 inches we read, so we don't want to worry about much bio load if they get bigger, but, I've kind of heard that shrimp don't produce much waste.

Anything else?

Thanks so much

 

[HN1]

Amano shrimp would be fine. As would cherries.

Cherries (and other similar shrimp) breed quite prolifically once mature. Amanos won't reproduce in FW because their larvae require brackish. Shrimp in general have a low bioload. Very easy to care for.

If a fish can fit them in their mouths, they likely will. Enjoy your future shrimp!

 

[dragon14]

Thank you! I think we will stick with Amano shrimp then. Are there any other shrimp that won't really breed in freshwater? We like the Amano, but it is good to keep options open just in case!

 

[Fishfur]

There are a few species you could have that have larvae, which require brackish or marine conditions to survive.

Sunkist.. caridina propinqua.. orange, about the size of a cherry shrimp. Full grown cherry females get to about 1.25 inches.. males a bit less. same for Sunkist pretty much.

Ghost shrimp.. the american species, palaemonetes. These actually do reproduce in fresh water but it's relatively rare for many of their larvae to survive.. so you will not have a ton of new ones showing up. Might get one or two, maybe. They get along with most other shrimps, so you can have more than one kind.

Fan shrimp.. filter feeders. Bamboo [ Atyopsis moluccensis]. Get fairly big, up to four inches or so. Totally peaceful, can't hurt anything, having no claws. They have big 'fans' on the front two pairs of feeding legs, which they use to sift food from water. They do require a good current to feed in, and very fine foods to sift from water, so may not be a good choice for smaller tanks. There is a much smaller species, less often seen, Atyopis spinipes.. wild form or Golden Fan.. size like Cherries, but also fan shrimp. Really interesting to observe feeding,, waving their fans in the water. May also bottom feed, but if they do it very often it may mean they're struggling to get enough food. Filter feeding is what they prefer.

Cherries also come in a host of other colours than red. Orange, yellow, white,blues, chocolate, green, and several gradations of red, from the wild form, which is near colourless, Painted Fire Reds and Bloody Mary, which is a very dense, intense red shrimp, thought to have colour throughout the body, not just the shell. They're rather costly, being a newer variant.

The last one I like, though it also has live babies like cherries, is Babaulti. Same size as cherry, but cannot cross breed with them. Green, often, but can be many colours.

If the shrimp you saw in the store were juvies, then you got a mistaken idea of their mature size.. full grown cherries show up vividly on dark substrates and plants too.

Edit. fwiw, fish often eat newborn cherry shrimps.. they are extremely small and if you don't choose to give them some good hiding places, they're pretty vulnerable for the first week or so at least. Even pygmy cories will eat baby shrimps.. so you might not get so many babies as you think. Though in general, cherries [ neocaridina heteropoda] are fairly prolific.

 

[dragon14]

Thanks for the information Fishfur! The cherries probably were juveniles I think we will refrain from them, though, because they seem to proliferate quickly.

Are ghost shrimp hard to keep? Our lfs does have them! The guy at the petstore recommended not keeping them (I can't remember why of course lol) and I think someone on here said her boyfriend has a really hard time keeping them alive!

I took a picture of all the shrimp names they had at the store on my ipod touch. The had orange shrimp, panda, and at least 5 more.

 

[dragon14]

I added an edit to my original reply to you Fishfur, in case you don't see it.

 

[Fishfur]

To each his own.. most of us are unhappy when the shrimp don't provide lots of babies .

I don't see the edit though..

Panda shrimp are really Taiwan bees, you don't want those. They're very delicate, require very special water conditions and care.

Cherry shrimp, by and large, are usually fairly hardy. But it's not totally unusual to lose one or two if the water they are coming to is very different from the water they came from. One thing you can do to offset this is called drip acclimation.

Two ways to do it.. put the new shrimp and their water into a bucket or container, set up an air hose with either a valve on it or tie a knot in it, so it drips just one drop every few seconds into the shrimp's water. This is a very gradual change to the new water, which can make it much less stressful for the shrimp. It also helps to have very low or no lights on during the acclimation.

Another way is to put them into a container and remove some of their water, which is replaced with water from their new tank. Add more new water, about a half cup at a time, for an hour or two, every fifteen to twenty minutes. Then gently add the lot to he tank.. making sure the temperature of the shrimp/water is the same as that of the tank they will go into.
This can be done with fish as well, and can make for a more gentle transition from the bag to the tank.

Edit.. Ghost shrimp are not hard to keep. Usually very tough little guys. However, they are usually sold as feeders.. so they are not handled with any great care as a rule. So sometimes you'll lose one or two, just because of indifferent or rough handling between capture and sale. Being native, they're all wild caught.

 

[dragon14]

To each his own.. most of us are unhappy when the shrimp don't provide lots of babies .

I don't see the edit though..

hehe Just don't want them overtaking the tank you know? And the pygmy catfish I very much doubt will eat them.... their mouths are so small.

Maybe I did it so fast you didn't see it before. It was the bit about ghost shrimp

 

[dragon14]

Amano Shrimp Care, Feeding, Algae Eating, Size, Lifespan - Video

On that link I found this info,
"That said, they sometimes die right after being added to a tank. This is most likely the result of stress from transport or shifts in water parameters. When an Amano Shrimp dies, its a good idea to remove it from the tank as soon as possible to avoid Ammonia Spikes, or to have the dead shrimp eaten by tank mates."

I don't want them to die when we bring them home! Are they (shrimp/amano shrimp) generally really that sensitive?

 

[Fishfur]

Well, I'll tell you, I have kept shrimp with Pygmies and Habrosus, and the babies pretty much all vanished. And I feed them California black worms, which they practically inhale, though the worms are up to 1.5 inches long and certainly have the diameter of a baby shrimp, and may be even thicker than a newborn shrimp is.

 

[dragon14]

Well, I'll tell you, I have kept shrimp with Pygmies and Habrosus, and the babies pretty much all vanished. And I feed them California black worms, which they practically inhale, though the worms are up to 1.5 inches long and certainly have the diameter of a baby shrimp, and may be even thicker than a newborn shrimp is.

Good to know! Maybe we'll get two different kinds then Decisions decisions!

 

[Fishfur]

Sometimes, shrimp die soon after you get them. Any species may have this happen and it's the reason I suggested drip acclimation.

Amano and Ghosts are all wild caught, and so are the filter feeding Fan shrimp. So they've been through a lot by the time you get them home. Cherries and their like are mostly captive bred, but the parameters of the water they were raised in might be quite different from yours. All these shrimp need hard, alkaline water for their shells to be healthy and to moult properly, so make sure you have that to offer them.

There is not really anything else you can do, beyond drip acclimation and keeping water clean & parameters stable. Most of these species have a lifespan of about 12-18 months at most, so if they don't have babies, you'll be replacing them at some point anyway. Though the big Bamboo shrimp live much longer than the small shrimp do.

Don't buy shrimp that just arrived in the store that day or even that week, it helps if they have been there for a week or more, during which time the weakest ones will die, unfortunately. But better they die there than in your tank, sad to say. Nothing in this hobby is guaranteed to survive, and that applies to pretty much anything you might bring home.

 

[dragon14]

I am not sure if our water is hard... the ph is 7.6+, and we get water spots on things if they aren't dried thoroughly. I don't know if that is a way to tell. Is there a test kit that will tell me this? Maybe the GH/KH test kit? Which I haven't bothered to purchase yet because I didn't think I had a need.

Is drip acclimation basically just slowly adding water from your tank to the bag the shrimp are in or? Today after floating the pygmys, we put them in our small tank with 50% tank water and then poured them out in the tank with their water from the bag, and waited about a half hour then moved them. I think we did something similar last time, and they seem fine. I was thinking about using a clean plastic tub or something to slowly acclimate the shrimp, I dunno. I want to do the best I can, but we don't have much options in way of separate tanks and stuff, and the small tank we used for the catfish today will be holding our female betta temporarily.

 

[Fishfur]

Actually, one thing I should have mentioned, Ghost shrimp will sometimes eat baby cherries too. They're not all that adept at catching them, but they will eat one if they do catch it.

Once the babies get to about 3/8 or a half inch they'll usually be ok with Ghosts. I suspect Amanos would do this as well, but I haven't kept them with Cherries myself, so I'm not certain. Overall, not much different than keeping them with fish that might eat them.

 

[dragon14]

Actually, one thing I should have mentioned, Ghost shrimp will sometimes eat baby cherries too. They're not all that adept at catching them, but they will eat one if they do catch it.

Once the babies get to about 3/8 or a half inch they'll usually be ok with Ghosts. I suspect Amanos would do this as well, but I haven't kept them with Cherries myself, so I'm not certain. Overall, not much different than keeping them with fish that might eat them.

Thanks

 

[Fishfur]

The fact you get spots indicates it's fairly hard so it should be ok.. the pH is fine. And you can drip acclimate in anything that holds water, even the bag the shrimp come in if it's not really small. I've put the bag into a pitcher and then dripped.. and yes, it's basically just slowly adding water from the tank to the water they're in. Just much slower than a 50% change at one time.

Floating the bag only equalizes temperature.. even if you poke holes in the bag and let it float awhile longer, the waters don't mix all that well.

Many shrimp keepers believe that the main thing that shocks shrimp is a change in the TDS. This means total dissolved solids, and refers to anything dissolved in the water, from the natural minerals to the various pollutants that water contains these days. Drip acclimating helps equalize TDS as well as pH and other parameters.. you just have to watch the temperature, because a small container of water will get cool fairly quickly.

 

[dragon14]

The fact you get spots indicates it's fairly hard so it should be ok.. the pH is fine. And you can drip acclimate in anything that holds water, even the bag the shrimp come in if it's not really small. I've put the bag into a pitcher and then dripped.. and yes, it's basically just slowly adding water from the tank to the water they're in. Just much slower than a 50% change at one time.

Floating the bag only equalizes temperature.. even if you poke holes in the bag and let it float awhile longer, the waters don't mix all that well.

Many shrimp keepers believe that the main thing that shocks shrimp is a change in the TDS. This means total dissolved solids, and refers to anything dissolved in the water, from the natural minerals to the various pollutants that water contains these days. Drip acclimating helps equalize TDS as well as pH and other parameters.. you just have to watch the temperature, because a small container of water will get cool fairly quickly.

Thank you for the excellent information!

Yeah, we floated for temperature reasons, no other reason

 

[dragon14]

We'll slowly acclimate the shrimp. We are really excited to get some

Slightly off topic, do you know if ich is more likely in wild-caught critters than bred critters? I think c. pygmaues is wild caught too though. The tanks at the lfs look pretty healthy to me. I don't really see any odd or sick fish, which is a good sign!

I don't want ich, ick!

 

[dragon14]

Fishfur,

In your opinion, should shrimp have live plants? We don't really want to get into all of that yet. We have a decent number of fake plants.

 

[Fishfur]

Ich is a parasite that's present in the wild, so wild caught fish really ought to be handled as if they had parasites, because many of them do. Ich can be a bit of a pain if you have it, but it's nowhere near the worst thing you might have to deal with. Usually it's fairly straightforward to treat.

The single best precaution anyone can take to avoid having a tank full of parasites or contagious disease is to use a QT. [quarantine, or quarantine tank] To work properly a QT should be big enough to handle any fish you propose to own, and furnished similarly to the main tank, though using some fake plants is fine as they won't be affected by treatment that could harm real ones. It should have filtration as well.

[ many keep a spare sponge in the main tank or filter to use when QT is needed. - the sponge can be used for its BB in a QT filter for a few fish pretty much right away]

As for my opinion on plants vs shrimp.. if you are able to give them a few live plants they will appreciate them greatly. Some are pretty easy to maintain, but fake ones can serve too.

Live plants provide several things for shrimp.

One; hiding spots - both at the bottom and anywhere on the plant, each leaf is an extra surface to roam on, so they're overall less visible to potential predators. This is less about any possible predators in your tank, and more about shrimp being a prey item in nature. Their instinct is to hide when they think danger is about. Some of them appear quite oblivious to potential dangers, for sure, but still, they like the multiple levels growing leaves provide. Fake plants may not have as many levels as live ones, but they'll still help.

Two; feeding opportunities - What they eat, however, is not the plant, it's the biofilm and possible algae that grows on the leaves.. so fake plants can provide this.. try for at least one that has a lot of leaves on it

Three; cleaner water - plants do use waste compounds to grow, so they help keep water cleaner. But filtration does this too, so if live plants aren't something you want to do right now, you don't have to, just for the shrimp.

Try to ensure there are a reasonable number of places to hide in the tank..
[ the more places they have to hide in, the less likely they are to use them.I suspect it gives them a bit of confidence ]. Using rocks or wood or any other decor also provides more surface area for biofilm. Shrimp will pick at any surface available.

Hope that helps.