I wanted to get some different colour shrimp to help liven up the Shrimphaus but it’s not good to mix different colour morphs of the same species as the offspring will eventually wind up as wild-type colouration. Shrimphaus already has two different morphs of Caridina cantonensis shrimp: pure red line (PRL) and more generic crystal […]
Read more →Author: Andy Pierce
Learning about planted freshwater aquaria and WordPress.
With the caridina shrimp I’m trying to keep the KH around 30 ppm CaCO3 (about 1.7 dKH) by pre-treating Cambridgeshire tap water with a suitable amount of hydrochloric acid (HCl). The problem is the old aquasoil has been resisting the new water chemistry. The other problem is the aquasoil is brown/black and the slate is […]
Read more →I picked up some banded panchax, also known as clown killifish, for the Fireplace Aquarium. The local fish store (LFS) only had four of them and they were all female. This is because the males have showier fins so mostly that’s what people buy. Nevermind – I think the females look great. Friendly LFS person […]
Read more →Staurogyne repens is an ‘easy to grow’ and popular aquatic plant. I have been resisting trying this plant for some reason… too easy, too popular? Anyway, it has a low growth habit but isn’t a carpeting plant, so seems like it might be right for the Shrimphaus. I usually prefer potted plants, but at the […]
Read more →Replanting actually… I was looking for something that could grow submersed in the back right corner of the Shrimphaus that might be able to break the water surface and grow emersed. Amazon sword plants (Echinodorus species) are sometimes able to do that and I looked for an intermediate sized one with interesting aspects and came […]
Read more →Aquasoil (there are various brands and types) is “an active bottom layer that lowers the pH value and slightly affects the water chemistry“. One aspect is to slowly leach out fertiliser into the water column over time. How about that ‘lowers the pH’ piece? One way would be to have the aquasoil directly add acid […]
Read more →Recently following a heavy rain one of the residual current breakers (RCD) on the main breaker box of the house tripped and could not be reset which took down half of the lighting and almost all of the wall sockets. I strung up a network of extension leads to the one remaining live socket (for […]
Read more →Despite all the advice to the contrary, I tried out some Caridina shrimp in the tapwater-based Shrimphaus. This did not go well and after 3 weeks there was only one brave survivor left. The usual way to keep soft water shrimp is to start with reverse-osmosis (RO) water which is selectively remineralised mostly to restore […]
Read more →‘Crystal Red’ caridina shrimp: top-down view on the edge of the river Bloody Mary shrimp (Neocaridina davidi) have been living in the Shrimphaus for a couple years now and are starting to get a little long in the tooth. Their solid dusky red colour also makes them difficult to see against the dark aquasoil and […]
Read more →It’s been a challenge to find an epiphyte that looks good on the mountain. I tried Anubias nana ‘Snow White’ which failed to grow, and the similar Anubias nana ‘Pinto’ which grew fine but looked too big for the nanotank. Also in the mix was Bucephalandra caterina which grew well and kind of resembled a […]
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