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I'm often asked what's the best way to carry out routine maintenance on a shrimp tank
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So in this video I thought I'd share with you what I do and how I do it
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Hello friends, welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Richard and I'm a fish and shrimp breeder based in the UK
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So for me the first step is always carrying out a partial water change
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tend to change on these smaller tanks around 50% of the water about once a week give or take
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In my experience the easiest way to carry a water change is to submerge a small piece of tubing into the water and drain it down into a bucket
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Here you can see on this piece of tubing I've actually fixed a filter intake sponge over the
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end of the tubing. In my experience when you're changing water in a shrimp tank there is a tendency
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for the shrimp to be curious head towards the end of the tubing and before you know it
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they're in your bucket this is also true of baby fish if you've ever had to water change a tank
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with baby fish it's amazing how often they end up getting sucked down the pipe and into your bucket
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by fixing this small intake sponge over the end I've solved all that problem I don't have to worry
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now where the hose is in relation to the shrimp or the baby fish so as mentioned I'll typically
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change about 50% of the tank water but I'm not too precious. I don't measure the 50% mark. I tend
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to drain it down to about the halfway point. In this particular tank I'm running a hang-on back
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filter so the natural point at which I drain it down to is the top of the filter intake sponge
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If I drop too much below that the filter will suck in air and then I have to go to the trouble of restarting the filter This isn such a problem if you using sponge filters One important point to mention here when you draining down a tropical tank
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is do make sure you switch off the heater. You can see in the background there the heater isn't fully submerged anymore
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You'd be amazed how many heaters I've broken over the years where I've drained down the tank and forgotten to unplug the heater first
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Nightmare. Okay, so once we've drained out all of our water, the next job is to clean the glass panels of any algae. I don't fear algae. Algae isn't a bad thing
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in a shrimp tank. Algae is actually really positive. Algae helps process waste but I don't want algae
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growing on the panels I want to look through. So here I only tend to clean the panels I wish to view
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the shrimp for you. I don't clean the back panel. If the rocks had algae on I wouldn't worry about
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cleaning those. I'm not trying to eradicate the algae. I'm just trying to make it easier for me to
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observe the shrimp and that's certainly easy without having to look through a thick screen of
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algae. Now as mentioned on this particular tank I'm running a hang-on back filter and you can see
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that I've just removed the intake sponge. Hang-on back filters have a strainer over the end of their
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intake pipe but that strainer is designed primarily to stop fish getting sucked in
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It won't stop shrimp or baby shrimp from being sucked into the hang-on-back filter
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where they will surely die. By placing the small intake sponge over the strainer I make it so no
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shrimp can possibly get sucked up into that filter. To clean the intake sponge I just squeezed it out
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a few times in the bucket of water I had drained out of the tank so with the water drained out and everything clean the next job is to start refilling the tank
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In this case I'm using the jug method. I've just filled my large bucket up with tap water
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I've dechlorinated it. I've left it a couple of minutes for the dechlorinator to work
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and now I'm just refilling it from a jug. What you can't see in this video is this tank sits
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about six feet in the air up on the top of my racking system. When I refill my shrimp tanks I
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just use regular tap water. My tap water comes out at about 7.6 pH and we have fairly hard water
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There are a lot of dissolved minerals in our water. Neocaridina shrimp like red cherry shrimp
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they do need those minerals to allow them to grow properly and to help them when they molt
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if you had very soft water out of the tap you may wish to add some additional minerals perhaps
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using crushed coral or wonder shell or something similar if you weren't keeping red cherry shrimp
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let's say you were keeping caradina shrimp crystal red shrimp or something similar then they prefer
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the soft water they don't like the minerals in the same way but for me near caradina shrimp
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my tap water is hard it works absolutely perfect I like to refill the tanks using the jug method it means I can add the water
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slowly I don't disturb the shrimp too much I don't stir up the substrate too much
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it's simply a case of putting it back one jug at a time
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and enjoying the process water changing is something I've always quite enjoyed
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one thing I should point out here is I do go to some effort to get
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the new water at roughly the same temperature as the water I removed This tank here only holds about eight gallons of water and if I were to put four gallons of freezing cold tap water back in
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there is the chance I could shock the shrimp with a sudden water change. So I try and get the water
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and put it back in at roughly the same temperature. I don't worry about getting it exact. I just put
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my hand in the tank, put my hand in the fresh water and try and level the two up more or less
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the heater will quickly adjust the temperature and the shrimp will be absolutely fine
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One thing you may notice after a water change is thousands and thousands of tiny bubbles
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forming on every surface the glass the java moss the rocks. This is just gases being released from
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new water after the dechlorinator has been added. Within a couple of hours they're typically all
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dispersed and the water is crystal clear. So that is essentially my shrimp tank maintenance routine
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I give the glass a quick wipe, remove any splash marks and leave them to it
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I typically do this about once a week, but if it goes eight or nine days, it doesn't tend to matter
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If my schedule allows me to do it on day six instead of day seven, I certainly don't worry about it
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Shrimp have a very small bio load. Leaving them a day or two longer is not going to cause any major issues
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Now this tank you're looking at houses my gold line yellow Neocaridina shrimp
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and they're part of my 100 day shrimp breeding challenge where I see how many shrimp I can produce in just 100 days
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If you haven't seen that series yet, I'll put a link on screen now. Otherwise, thanks for watching
