Starting a New Shrimp Tank

[fishguy123456]

Hello everyone,

I am thinking about stating a new red cherry fish tank in my 10 gallon. I have never had shrimp before, and have a little idea to what I should buy. Here's what I am thinking about getting, if you can let me know if I am on the right track that would be great!

A Aqueon 100gph quiet filter along with a under gravel filter. Fluval stratum (4.4 pound bag). Three giant moss balls and a foot long piece of driftwood.

I was also wondering if I should hook up a sponge filter to the Aqueon filter just ecause I am dealing with Shrimp. Do you think that 10 shrimp is too many shrimp for this kind of tank? What else am I missing?

 

[TheresaM]

That's a lot of filtration! I have two 10g shrimp tanks, one with no filter, the other with a sponge. You could easily have more than 10 shrimp in that size tank.

They do best in an established tank and very much appreciate biofilm. I use Indian almond leaves, alder cones, and cholla wood.

 

[fishguy123456]

Should I get anything to test the water content?

 

[ScotJudd]

I run my main tank, which also has a colony of RCS, with 2 canister filters and despite covering the inlets with netting, I still find shrimp living in the filter. They seem to come to no harm and grow quite big but I wouldn't recommend it.
My QT also has a RCS colony but it requires very little filtration. I use a small internal filter with and extra sponge over the casing to prevent the baby shrimp getting sucked up. Even this is quite a lot of filtration when there is only shrimp in the tank.
As said before, shrimp really need to be introduced into an established tank. RCS eat non stop and you can't feed often enough to compensate for lack of bio film in the tank. Putting plants and mosses from another established tank can help a lot.
As for water testing, I keep my tanks at Ph 7, ammonia 0, nitrite 0, nitrate <10, Gh 6 and Kh 6. Gh is quite important for the shrimps shell, if it's way out then the shrimp can die whilst shedding, which they do often. My temp is quite high for shrimp at 78f but they still do quite well.
Copper is their number on enemy so copper based medication should never be used. Traces of copper in food and some fertilisers seems to be tolerated.
Hope it goes well for you. Don't get discouraged if the colony don't take off at first attempt, it took me 3 goes to get them going but now I have hundreds.



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