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Shrimp over population?

H

HawaiiJambo

New Member
Joined
23 Aug 2022
Messages
9
Location
Edinburgh Scotland
Hi folks, need some advice here. I set my 250 lir tank up 6 months ago and it is thriving. I have a low fish density 10 Neon, 10 Harlequin and 6 Corys. I also had 10 cherry shrimp and 15 nerite snails. All are very healthy. Everything I read suggested I would need more shrimp as fry would be eaten by the fish so i was prepared to get more. To my surprise i spotted very young shrimp in the tank. The Neons were eating some but not all. Slowly the population grew until about a month ago when it exploded!

I fished out 30 last week and gave them to the local shop. That was a fraction of my stock which must be 100+ of all sizes. I've tested my water and it's good but am concerned if this explosion continues I'm going to overwhelm the filtration and have a mass die out. So I have two questions:

Is there a rule of thumb for shrimp population to tank size? I've probably got about 200 ltr of open water.
Much as I hate the idea, is there a predator fish I could introduce that would control the young but not the adults or fish? The Neons are trying, read hunting in the plants but clearly many are hiding until their too big.

I can and will continue to supply the shop or preferably local fish keepers but don't think I can keep up with the breeding.
 
The population will self regulate according to how much you feed the rest of your livestock; just don't overfeed. I could have five times that in my 280ltr, who knows. I wouldnt be concerned about their really relatively small bioload.

Cherry don't tend to go for a walk, unlike amano

Edinburgh too, by the way
 
You could increase the number of Neons a bit so that fewer shrimplets survive. More Neons should look good too.
 
I'm in Edinburgh and have some elegans Cory if you wanted some. They won't help with shrimp, more likely to cuddle them.
 
How are your shrimp surviving? Water is far too soft on the west coast 😭
 
What about a nice pair of Rams. They will control the population.
Or a tiny Scarlet Badis, they are also good for population control as small and eat the young. And also a fun little fish that you will see stalking amongst the plants and hardscape.
There are a few different types available in the UK now.
 
I was worried about that as testing confirmed it is very soft but both the shrimp and snails are doing well. I don't add hardner and as a result the pH varies during the day with the CO2 added then recovers overnight. As I say the shrimp are thriving and I've had no fish mortality.

I have thought about adding more Neons but like the current setup. More Corys would be nice but do little for the shrimp explosion as the current ones root about amongst them and just push them to the side if they are in the way. The shrimp are not afraid of them or the neons and Harlequins for that matter...
 
xZaiox said:
I had a similar experience with a group of cherry barbs - perhaps barbs in general have a taste for shrimp? 😬
Click to expand...
My barbs wiped out the shrimp in the tank once they grew enough and got a taste for them! there were probably 300-400 shrimp in there!
 
I have thought about a pair of Rams I know they can get territorial so at least part of the tank would be shrimp free:) I'll heck outthe basis might be what I'm looking for.

I saw a really interesting demonstration of the number of them a few days back. A whole load of them did a sort of follow the leader thing and ended up in a loop following each othe around some bodwood Wish I'd caught it on video...
 
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