Here is a new baby Blue Velvet neocaridina shrimp in the shrimphaus. A berried Tangerine Tiger caridina shrimp does its thing on the left side with a pure red line caridina watching on. The zoom out at the end shows the scale. I thought the Blue Velvets were not doing well, but there are at […]
Read more →Category: Shrimphaus
Low-tech shrimp+snails aquarium; no CO2 injection; project-specific notes, observations, and maintenance.
The Shrimphaus gets some light brown coloured algae-like material growing on the glass which needs periodic scraping off. It won’t just rub off casually, but it comes off using a credit card blank relatively easily. It does seem to happen more in regions of higher lighting. It isn’t super unsightly, and doesn’t happen fast enough […]
Read more →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 →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 →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 →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 →I have been using an Asta 20 nano LED light on the Shrimphaus, and that’s been fine but it’s a point source light so there’s not much illumination at either the back (shaded by the river) or the right side (furthest away). Today I swapped that out for a new Week Aqua S400 Pro aquarium […]
Read more →I have been considering floating plants for a while, but they always looked kind of big and dangly and nasty to me which has put me off. Then the Aquatic Plant Society had a get together at Aquarium Gardens and I saw this pretty new (to me) much smaller floating plant from Tropica: Salvinia minima. […]
Read more →