It perhaps will not come as a big surprise that the hobby sometimes ascribes common names incorrectly to species names. Tangerine Tiger shrimp are a case in point. Tangerine Tiger shrimp are almost universally described in the hobby as Caridina serrata, but actually they are Caridina cantonensis (much more on that below). Does it matter […]
Read more →Category: Science
Evidence-based systematic investigation using experiment, scientific literature, and/or first principles to explain and predict outcomes.
I love my shrimp! It’s great fun watching them zoom happily around the Shrimphaus. The conventional wisdom in the hobby is keep different fancy colour morphs of the same species separate, so they don’t cross-breed and revert to “boring” wild-type colouration, but it is fun to experiment as well and if you’re not too fussed […]
Read more →Statement of Significance Freshwater aquarium shrimp breeding relies on empirical knowledge about which species can interbreed, but quantitative predictions of compatibility remain limited. We used molecular phylogenetics to measure genetic distances between 17 popular aquarium shrimp species and calibrated a breeding compatibility scale using well-documented hybridization outcomes in felids. Phylogenetic distances within Caridina ranged from […]
Read more →Stable pH and transient pH changes To get started, let’s discuss factors that apply universally to planted tanks. For simplicity we’ll work under the assumption that aquarium hardscape and substrate is pH inert. Then there are two main ways pH can change, transiently, usually on a day/night driven cycle, and stably which operates more long-term. […]
Read more →I’ve been playing around with the relatively new Dust LLM (Gemini also helped a lot) and decided to have it work through bicarbonate pH buffering in an aquarium. At equilibrium, the pH in an aquarium is determined by only two factors: the concentration of CO2 in the air over the water’s surface Note 1, and […]
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 →An interesting and widely misunderstood concept is the distribution of carbonate species (DIC: dissolved inorganic carbon) in an aquarium. What you usually see is a form of Bjerrum plot where it looks very much like the amount of dissolved CO2 goes to zero as the pH gets much higher than 7. Where this goes wrong […]
Read more →Cambridgeshire has hard, alkaline tap water. A number of iron salts such as iron phosphates and hydroxides are essentially insoluble. This can potentially cause issues with lack of iron availability for plants in an aquarium. In both the Fireplace Aquarium and the Shrimphaus, modified estimative index fertilising provides plenty of phosphates, and the alkaline tap […]
Read more →In a high alkalinity low-tech (non-CO2 injected) aquarium like the Shrimphaus there is a significant amount of potential carbon dioxide locked away and mostly unusable by plants in the form of bicarbonate. High alkalinity also means high pH, both of which are reputedly bad for aquarium plants. In theory, you can solve both problems – […]
Read more →The carbonic acid / bicarbonate / carbonate buffering system is very important in an aquarium and largely controls both the pH and the resistance to change of the pH in the water. These three carbonate-based species can all interconvert in a connected equilibrium reaction: (1) H2CO3 (carbonic acid) ⇌ H+ + HCO3– (bicarbonate) ⇌ 2H+ […]
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