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Appreciation post: my desk shrimp bowl finally stopped being a swamp after I quit vacuuming it every week
Six months ago I had a 2 gallon bowl on my desk at work in Portland and I was doing a 50 percent water change and gravel vacuum every Sunday like clockwork. The shrimp kept dying off one at a time and I could not figure out why, I was testing everything and it all looked fine. Then a guy at my local fish store asked me one question, how often do I deep clean, and when I said weekly he just laughed at me. Turns out I was nuking the biofilm and microfauna the baby shrimp actually eat, plus stressing everybody out every seven days. I switched to topping off with RO water and doing maybe a 15 percent change every 3 weeks, sometimes 4 if the snails look happy. The colony went from 6 shrimp to somewhere around 40 now and the java moss has this fuzzy green layer on it that they graze on all day. If you have a small bowl and your shrimp keep vanishing, how often are you messing with it?
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skylerg1712d ago
Man, my buddy went through the exact same thing with his little 3 gallon setup, killed like a dozen shrimp before some old timer told him to stop scrubbing everything. He backed off to small top offs and a light change once a month tops, and next thing you know the babies were everywhere. Sometimes doing less is the whole trick with these little bowls.
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