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Common Shrimp Tank Pests and How to Deal With Them - PLANARIA, HYDRA, DETRITUS WORMS AND MORE!
Feb 17, 2023
Pests can be the bain of a shrimp keeper's life. Planaria, hydra, daphnia and detritus worms can all be hard to deal with, especially as many medications will also kill our shrimp.
In this video, I look at four of the most commonly seen pests in shrimp tanks and discuss how they can be dealt with.
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0:00
There is nothing more disheartening than looking into your shrimp tank only to see you have pests
0:05
living in there. Whether it's Hydra, Planaria, Daphnia, shrimp tanks are easily overrun by pests
0:12
and in this video I'm going to discuss the most common pests we find in our shrimp tanks and how
0:17
we can deal with them. Hello friends, welcome back to the channel. If you're new here my name is
0:22
Richard and I'm a fish and shrimp breeder based in the UK. So the first pest I want to discuss
0:26
today is Daphnia. Now Daphnia are tiny little crustaceans that are also called
0:31
water fleas and they get the name water fleas because of the jerky movement they
0:36
make traveling through the water. Now the good thing about Daphnia is they are
0:42
totally harmless to your shrimp tank. They don't cause any problems at all, they
0:46
don't even compete for food really. Daphnia want to eat tiny tiny particles
0:51
traveling through the water. If you're raising Daphnia commercially you actually feed them green water, which is single-celled algae floating around in the water
0:59
So whilst it can be annoying to have Daphnia in your tank, they don't actually cause any problems
1:05
whatsoever to your shrimp. Now, a couple of years ago, I made a very foolish mistake. I came up with
1:10
the bright idea of removing some duckweed from one of my outdoor ponds and placing it in with
1:16
these goldfish. Goldfish love eating duckweed. The problem was I bought with it Daphnia. And ever
1:22
since then, whenever I've moved, I then moved java moss from this tank into this tank from here to
1:27
here to here to here. I have Daphnia in all my tanks now. I just can't get rid of it. I water
1:32
change heavily sometimes to try and suck most of it out. You've only got to leave one or two
1:36
individual Daphnia in the tank and before you know it, the population's back again. As I say
1:41
for us shrimp keepers, Daphnia are just an annoyance. They don't cause any problems at all. I'm not aware of any medications you might use to treat Daphnia. Although I have heard that
1:50
the chlorinators such as Seachem Prime will kill Daphnia. Again, apparently if you raise Daphnia commercially
1:58
it's very difficult to do water changes because if you use dechlorinated water, you kill the Daphnia
2:02
If you use tap water with chlorine in it, you kill the Daphnia. I've tried it a bit here
2:06
I've played with it, but I've not had 100% success rate, but it's better than nothing
2:12
If you do have Daphnia, one way you can get rid of it is to simply introduce a small fish
2:18
Now in these tanks up here I have a single baby guppy that I've removed from
2:24
a guppy breeding tank. I drop one or two into each tank and hopefully they keep
2:29
the Daphnia population under control and once they grow too large I'll take them
2:34
out put them back in the tank and bring another baby and drop that in. Will they eat some baby shrimp? Probably. But if I don't do that the population of Daphnia
2:43
will just totally explode and I'll be raising more Daphnan than I am shrimp
2:49
Pest number two is detritus worms and in my experience there are two different
2:55
types of detritus worms we come up against. The brown ones which live in the
2:59
gravel or in the substrate and the white ones which tend to be more all over the
3:04
glass and travel more freely throughout the tank Now detritus worms again they don harm your shrimp In fact detritus worms are a natural part of a balanced ecosystem When our fish go to the bathroom or they eat and they allow food to spill out they don finish it
3:22
all, the shrimp come along and eat the fish poop and the uneaten food. When the shrimp go to the
3:28
bathroom, snails come along and snails break down that poop even further. And then when the snail
3:34
goes to the bathroom, detritus worms break their poop down even further. It's part of a balanced
3:39
ecosystem. In our fish tanks when we have detritus worms and I would say almost every person watching
3:46
who has a fish tank does have detritus worms, the fish tend to keep the worms under control
3:51
Fish will root around in the gravel, many of them such as guppies, mollies, goldfish. They'll root
3:56
around in the substrate and they are looking for tasty morsels such as detritus worms
4:04
Corydoras are particularly famed for their abilities to root through the substrate
4:08
looking for live foods such as detritus worms. Again the problem is when we keep shrimp only
4:14
tanks we often don't have the predators in there to keep the detritus worms under control
4:20
Generally speaking in my experience detritus worms don't harm your shrimp in any way but you can get
4:26
to the point where you have so many detritus worms that they actually compete for food. Many of you
4:32
will know I like to feed rapache. I recently had a 20-gallon aquarium just for shrimp, a shrimp
4:39
breeding tank. The detritus worms became such a problem in there. When I dropped a cube of rapache
4:45
in, after a couple of minutes, the shrimp would actually surround it. It was bizarre. It was
4:50
almost creepy. Hopefully, we don't allow our shrimp tanks to get to that stage, but it can happen
4:57
As a rule, detritus worms do not harm your shrimp in the slightest. They're not interested in the
5:02
shrimp. They are detritus worms. They live off of the detritus. They live off of shrimp poop
5:07
uneaten food, bits of vegetation that are breaking down. Essentially anything that they can come
5:13
across. The best ways to deal with detritus worms, if you have them in your aquarium, is
5:18
the best way is gravel vaccing. That's fabulous in a decent sized tank, but if you tried gravel
5:23
vaccing something this small, you only get a few inches across and you're out of water
5:28
It doesn't work very well. You can add a predatory fish such as a couple of Corydoras which will
5:33
certainly bring the detritus worm numbers right down. Again, will they eat some baby shrimp
5:40
They probably will truth be told. Those shrimp are pretty good at shooting out of the way when
5:44
fish come near them. I'm not aware of any good medications that work on detritus worms especially
5:52
when they're living deep down in the substrate. Most of our aquarium water circulates throughout
5:57
the tank thanks to the filters, but unless we're using something like an under gravel filter
6:02
the water, and therefore any medication, doesn't really get down to the deep layers
6:05
to kill the detritus worms. So when I've been suffering with detritus worms in the past
6:11
I've got to the point where I was unacceptable. The tank had more detritus worms in it than
6:16
anything else, and I ended up breaking the tank down, washing all the gravel, refilling
6:21
rebuilding the tank and going from there And that works fairly well to be fair Although one or two detritus worms always find their way back in I don know how they do it but I don think I ever come across a fish tank ever that didn have a detritus worm in it Now before I move on to the next two pests
6:37
both of which can cause problems in your aquarium, I wonder if I could ask a small favour. Only 25
6:44
of the people who watched my videos last month subscribed to the channel. Now, if you could take
6:49
a moment to subscribe if you haven't already done so. Not only does it mean a great deal to me
6:53
personally, but the larger I can grow this channel, the more videos I can create, the more entertainment
6:58
and information I can bring to you. So please take a moment and click the subscribe button
7:04
So pest number three on our list can be a real problem and that's Hydra. Now Hydra are
7:09
fascinating little creatures that tend to live on the glass of our aquariums, but they will also live
7:14
on the rocks, the gravel, they'll live pretty much anywhere. Hydra look like small stems with
7:19
tiny little tentacles coming off them really. They're one of the most fascinating creatures
7:25
in the world. They're studied by science because scientists have what they describe as immortal
7:30
cells. Essentially, you take a hydra, you chop that up into tiny pieces and each of those tiny
7:37
pieces will become a new hydra. A fascinating creature. However, the problem for us is hydra
7:43
do prey on the smallest baby shrimp. Hydra are essentially micro predators and they're waiting
7:51
for tiny crustaceans, tiny waterborne creatures including baby shrimp to swim by at which point
7:56
they will grab them and consume them. Now the biggest problem with hydra is how do we get rid
8:03
of them. One method people use is to take a when you're doing a water change take a small piece of
8:09
airline hose, get a siphon going and try and suck them up. But remember, if you break the hydra as
8:14
you're doing that, you've essentially created more hydra in your tank. So another way we can try and
8:20
remove the hydra from our tank is to add predator fish. If you put something like guppies or mollies
8:25
into your aquarium, they will happily consume the hydra. The problem here is, of course, they will
8:31
also happily consume baby shrimp. It depends how much of a problem you feel the hydra are and whether
8:37
or not you need to actually rid your tank of them. Now, one method I have tried in the past with
8:41
Hydra is to starve them out. And if essentially Hydra populations bloom when you add lots of food
8:50
and this typically happens in fish breeding tanks. So where we put lots of brine shrimp in
8:56
or lots of powdered food, that's perfect for the Hydra. The Hydra love to eat brine shrimp
9:01
and their numbers will blossom. If you hold back the feeding, they will die off pretty quickly
9:09
The problem is your shrimp also need to eat. So providing you have a tank with plenty of algae
9:15
and plenty, it's a mature tank, so there's lots of biofilm, what you could try doing is just stop
9:20
feeding your shrimp. Don't put any food in for a week or two. Your shrimp will find plenty of
9:25
things to eat. Your shrimp will consume detritus. They'll consume the small starts of algae
9:31
They'll consume the biofilm living on the algae. Providing your tank is mature the shrimp can go two weeks without being fed no problem at all However the Hydra will quickly start to die off Now whether or not you completely eradicate them is another problem but there are very few medications that I aware of
9:48
that you can treat a tank for Hydra that won't also kill your shrimp and snails, and that's the
9:54
real problem. Now, pest number four is Planaria, and Planaria is the curse of all shrimp keepers
10:02
Planaria are tiny flatworms. They look a lot like detritus worms. You'll often see them
10:06
traversing the glass, but planaria have very distinctive arrow-shaped heads. I mean, they're
10:12
unmistakable. If you have a magnifying glass, or if you can get your phone camera and zoom in on
10:18
the small worms traversing the glass, if they're beautifully rounded at either end
10:24
they're detritus worms. No problem at all. However, if they have that distinctive arrow-shaped head
10:30
They're almost certainly planaria. And planaria will attack and kill shrimp. Now, fortunately, there are medications on the market that we can use to treat our shrimp tanks
10:42
And they will kill the planaria, but they won't harm our shrimp
10:46
And there's a product called Expel P by Fritz, which is talked about a lot on the internet
10:51
A lot of people have had great success with this product. You simply treat your aquarium and that will kill the planaria
10:58
but it also kills a number of other aquarium pests, many of which aren't a problem to your
11:03
shrimp, but it will still kill them. But it won't harm your shrimp. So if you find yourself
11:10
suffering with planaria, my number one recommendation is to source some expel pee
11:16
treat your aquarium, follow the instructions completely, treat your shrimp aquarium, and it should solve the planaria problem. You may need to repeat dose
11:24
but follow the instructions and it should solve your problem. Now there are of course other pests
11:31
that can get into our aquarium some of which are microorganisms cause us no problems whatsoever
11:35
like mosquito larvae. If you ever have a mosquito lay its eggs in your aquarium and the larvae hatch
11:41
out well they make fabulous fish food so drop a fish in they'll consume the mosquito larvae no
11:46
problem at all or hook them out and put them in one of your tanks. I wouldn't leave the mosquito
11:50
larvae because obviously they mature into mosquitoes. We can also end up with things like
11:54
a dragonfly larvae. Now dragonfly larvae are a problem. They will consume shrimp quite happily
12:00
and we have had in one of these tanks here we ended up somehow with dragonfly larvae in the
12:05
in the water and it set the breeding tank back several months. We didn't realize quickly enough
12:11
we had it. Unfortunately the damage was done. It's a case of seeing what you have, assessing whether
12:18
it's a problem and then finding the appropriate treatment to deal with the pest. With the
12:22
dragonfly larvae it was simply a case of pick them out when we see them and drop them into the goldfish who loved them. Now if you're enjoying shrimp keeping videos I'll put another
12:31
one up here that I think might be of interest. In the meantime, thanks for watching, have
12:35
a nice day
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Pets & Animals
Pets & Animals
Fish & Aquaria