[en7jos]

If my "big" 50 litre planted community tank is considered "nano", then what should I call my "little" 10 litre shrimp tank?
Micro? - no wait that's bigger than nano....
Pica? - sounds silly....
So I'm going with the "nano-nano" tank :grin2:

Thought I'd jump straight in with a video: Friday morning breakfast time with everyone out and about enjoying the ShrimpFit+ I had just squirted around the tank. Apologies that focus isn't perfect, but hopefully you get the idea.

A bit of tank history: I setup this tank about 3 months back as a project to entertain my son and I during lockdown here in Singapore. Choice of everything was restricted to what I could get delivered or pickup at my local (next door!) LFS before it closed. The tank was on special offer online for a very good price (60 SGD = 43 USD) and looked a neat little size to rehouse the 10 RCS from our main tank to see whether they might breed. Substrate and rocks were left over from our main tank, moss was taken from one of those "instant carpet" stainless steel mesh things.

After always wanting bigger tanks, more and bigger fish, it was fun to go small with both tank and inhabitants. It sits next to my home office desk and is by far and away my favorite tank ever. So much so that I am currently setting up two more identical tanks for some different shrimp so I'll have three of them in a line next to my desk. The shrimp are great fun to watch, fingers crossed they will start to breed soon, and the kids love them. Fish seem boring in comparison, but I love the micro-rasbora that are perfectly in scale for the tank and make the RCS look like giant lobsters.

Tank details

• Size: 20w x 35d x 22h cm
• Volume: 13l overall, just over 10l water capacity
• Filter: Built-in filter at the back, modified to add proper bio-filter, filter wool, foam and purigen
• 3.6W LED light that came with tank, controlled by cheap Chinese timer / dimmer
• Substrate: ADA Amazonia 3-4cm deep
• Hardscape: Rocks covered in moss, chola wood

Plants

• Christmas moss covering all rocks
• Salvinia (I think) floating on top
• Hemianthus callitrichoides - small clump in bottom left front corner has never really done anything

Inhabitants

• Red cherry shrimp x15
• Yellow goldenback shrimp x6 - waiting for their own tank to finish cycling
• "Exclamation point" rasbora (Boraras Urophthalmoides) x10
• Otto cats x2
• Malaysian trumpet snails - lots!

Water parameters

• Source: Originally soft Singapore tap water (3-4GH / 1-2KH), now gradually switching to bottled distilled until new RO unit arrives
• pH: ~7.2
• GH: 7
• KH: 0-1 (because of soil)
• Temp: 27-28C (81-82F) - room temperature, no chiller or fan
• W/C: Weekly 10-20% water changes

Fertilisers

• Full Seachem lineup at recommended doses, except...
• No Excel, No Advance
• No measurable phosphate and ~5ppm nitrate (API liquid tests) at end of week

So that's it really - my little nano-nano shrimp tank. It has been great fun and a huge learning curve to setup, and the kids and I all love it. It has been a big challenge though. Seems I transferred a whole host of uninvited guests with the moss. These weren't an issue (or even visible) in the main tank with fish, but with shrimp only in a new tank I've had to deal with white flatworms (thankfully not planaria!), hydra, so many micro-critters like cyclops and seed shrimp, snails, and who knows what else. Quite terrifying to examine the water under a magnifying glass with a torch late at night - eeek!

Current projects with the tank are:

• switching to RO water and from Equilibrium to SaltyShrimp minerals to take control of TDS
• precautionary treating all shrimp for "green fungus" after one of my RCS died from this a few days back (stupidly though the fungus was eggs - doh!)
• need to trim that moss, but shrimp and I like it au naturel, so I'm waiting for new tanks to cycle so I can use cuttings to cover new hardscape
• replicating to two more identical tanks to have a line-up on three next to my desk
• watch and enjoy!