Shrimp Journal

Yesterday was rearrange the shrimp room day!!I had new tanks to set up, I wanted to move the Fluval to the north bench, one of the tanks on that bench to the west bench, the two five gallons to the bottom shelf on the rack. I had three new tanks to set up.

Scott got an Alita air pump for me. It's the Alita 15, and with some careful finagling I managed to run an airline with a million connectors and splitters to run all the tanks but the one on the floor off one air pump. I got mine from Amazon, but Ryan Curtis at The Shrimp Farm can get a better deal on them. I was just limited to ordering off Amazon. I still have plans for Scott to run a line of pvc pipe all around the room and just drop an airline to each sponge filter in each tank, but I'm impatient and Scott is out of town for a week. I also didn't have enough air to rearrange the room and set up the new tanks with the pumps I already had running.

I'd made a mistake in only monitoring TDS like a couple other shrimp breeders I talk to, and only doing top offs with RO/DI water. When I realized I had a problem, I was having failed molts all over the place, and losing shrimp. My GH had gotten well above acceptable. My baby shrimp survival rate was in the toilet. I spent the last two weeks doing slow water changes to bring the GH back down.

I moved out cobalts into the blue dream tank, the auras and jades into that tank. I've already talked about the problem I was having with both of those shrimp dropping eggs. I haven't gotten any babies in that tank since I put the shrimp in months ago. In three days I must have 5 berried shrimp in there, so here's hoping again that I get babies. That left an empty caridina tank so the wine red pintos and a few black king kongs went into that tank. There were no more blue velvets in the 20t, I had the few survivors and the auction shrimp I won from Daniel Johnson in a hang on breeder. Those shrimp went into the empty 5g. Yesterday I moved all the jades/auras that weren't berried into the 20t. I hated them on the white gravel.

The three new empty dry tanks I bought got set up yesterday too. I only had one set of sponge filters cycling behind the matten filter in the 20l, so it's going to be a long process cycling them. I have one sponge filter cycling in the 36g out in the living room so in another week I should be good to go to swap that out for the sponge in one of the other new tanks.