[Gulfcoastguy]

Hi all, I have an experience I would like to share to break some of the myth about keeping shrimp in small tanks and being sucessful at breeding.

To start off with I have 12 tanks up atm from 2 1/2 gallon to 130 gallon and the best tank I have as far as breeding and sucessful baby raising is the smallest tank which is a 2 1/2 gallon.
I started with 15 sss CBS I had got off my large colony of CBS I have in a 75 gallon ( which dont breed that well and babys dont seem to make it past 1 week in that tank) so I decided to move the sss to the small tank in hopes I could get them going. To my surprize they grew very fast and were breeding at around 4 months old. At the moment I have over 60 shrimp in 2 1/2 gallon tank 15 are adults rest are jives and 2 of the adults are berried again so the myth about shrimp stop breeding when they reach a certain number in the tank isnt true, for the tank size I shouldnt have over 25 in the tank and theres 60 in there atm and 2 adults berried.

Now what I found was it seems the babys can find the food alot easier in the smaller tank verses babys I have in bigger tanks and believe it or not I can fed the small tank dailey with no ill effects on water quality. All I have for filter is a very old ehiem type filter that goes in the tank in the corner and I put a sponge off a sponge filter in it thats it thats all I have for filter and as fas as water changes go I might do 1/2 gallon water change every other week and the water I use is straight RO/DI water from my 5 stage filter system and I use Bee Shrimp mineral GH+ added to it. As far as plants in the tank I made a moss wall for the back of the tank which has pretty much blown up and covers about the whole tank now. I used akadama for substrate and have a cheap light hanging over it nothing speical or expsensive in the whole set up really.

As far as feeding goes I take a plastic cup and dip a little water out of the tank and then pour a small amount of BeBi baby food in the cup and stir it up so when i pour it back in the tank the food is goes evenly over the whole tank. Now compareing baby growth rate of the shrimp in the small tank to ones I have in bigger tanks is night and day the babies in the small tank are 3 to 5 times bigger then baby shrimp the same age in bigger tanks so its almost like you can *force* fed babys in a small tank because theres less area the babys have to cover to find food.

As far as the babies go I have found out that the colony of CBS I have had goldens added to them at some time because I have several golden babies in the small tank along with baby sss. Just thought I would share my experience the pictures below arent the best.

 

[Green_Flash]

congrats, I also like your moss wall

 

[dougolasjr]

I always thought that it was more of the fact that if something goes wrong it happens faster and is worse in a smaller tank.

 

[Soothing Shrimp]

+1 Larger water body, more stable the water params. Smaller water body, params change faster.

 

[belphegor]

What is the pH in the 2 1/2 gallons?

Mine won't reproduce at all in my 5 gallons.
Maybe its becayse I'm not using RO water and adding minerals. I just use straight tap. Ugh.

 

[Sake]

That isn't a moss wall...that's a freakin forest! Love it

 

[Gulfcoastguy]

The ph=6.2 gh=6.0 KH=0 and TDS is around 150 and I know all about the larger the tank the more *stable* the water parameters are but I have gone as long as 3 weeks with out a water change just adding R/O water to replace evaporation and feeding dailey.
I have CRS, CBS, OEBT, BKK and WR so I am sucessful at keeping them was just sharing what seems to be working very very well for me as far as breeding and raiseing babys.
The moss wall took all of about 3 weeks to go from nothing to covering the whole tank lol the light buble I use is a 56k CFL buble I bought at the grocery store.

 

[MSG]

How long did it take you to grow all that java moss?

Nevermind the J-moss question.

Thanks for taking the time to create this thread.

I tried something similar with a 4G column tank, less than stellar results.

I'll try it again hopefully sometime in January with some hardier varieties of inverts.

Did you mentioned how long that cube tank has been setup?

 

[Gulfcoastguy]

So figured there was no point in pushing *fate* any farther and pulled 30 babies out today and still have that many more left to pull out so my original number of shrimp in the tank was off. I figured with 3 more berried females in the tank it was best for me to make some room lol. The picture is a simple trap I made out of a plastic bottle and going from dailey feeding to starvin them for 3 days they couldnt get in trap fast enough lol.
And to answer your question the tank has only been up about 6 months now.