baj

All,
How often do you do water changes in your shrimp tanks? Ok this may sound really bad but it was unintentional I promise. I keep my shrimp tank covered with a piece of plexiglass and a el-cheapo light hood sits on top of that. Now I see a lot of condensation on the plexiglass so I was happy for a few days because it kept evaporation down. Now the thing is I missed water change for a week (so two weeks running on the same water) and today I got a very "musty" smell when I lifted the plexiglass. My tank is absolutely crawling with baby shrimp (really tiny, BBS sized) so I am assuming the smell is from dead baby shrimp? I am scared of doing a water change now even through the mattenfilter because I am sure I will either pull the little buggers up or trap them in the filter. The other thing is I found billions of milky white half a centimeter long worm like things crawling in the top layer of the gravel, are these planaria? I know I cant put a predator in the tank now ton get rid of them cause my shrimp babies will not appreciate that as well. So my questions are:
1) Whats the smell due to? (ie do you all also notice the smell when your shrimp tank has a spawning event?)
2) What do I do to take care of the babies (let nature take its course and select the strongest ones?)
3) What should I do about the planaria (will they harm the shrimp, shrimp babies or me).
I forgot to mention..... I keep cherries in the tank. And a couple of huge bamboo shrimp. There are between 50 to 75 billion snails in the tank (all ramshorns). The substrate is schultz aquatic soil, i have some 3 pieces of lava rock as well. The water temp is a bit high, about 77-81 (thermometer says 79 but I assume a +-2 variability, just like every other walmart product). I have 3 big bunches of rotala r., some java moss, some pellia, some marimo and some dwarf sags for plants.

Piscesgirl

Baj,

I do weekly water changes of approximately 40 percent in my 29 gallon shrimp tank. If you are worried about the water quality, you can try the nylon over the siphon to prevent shrimp babies from being sucked up.

Have you tested the Ammonia?

AaronT

I'm not sure what your problem might be or what the smell is. I had a 5.5 gallon tank that I filled with some plants and tons of java moss and I put a dozen green shrimp in it. I had a NO bulb over it with no filtration or water movement at all. I never fed them anything and I pulled out 40+ shrimp months later.

JanS

I do 50% weekly on the shrimp tanks.

It's possible that you have anaerobic pockets in your substrate, and that may be causing the smell.

I would just say to scoop the water out with a pitcher or cup, but the problem might be in your substrate if there are dead babies or the pockets, so it would be best to use PG's suggestion to put something on the tube to prevent sucking the babies up.

How big is the tank?

Piscesgirl

My guess is the white things are indeed planaria. I've got them as well.

baj

Jan, its a 10g tank. I will run an ammonia test on it, but its not that unpleasant ammonia, H2S etc smell, its really distinct, like if you enter an old attic or something....

baj

Are they ok? or do they need to be booted somehow?

baj

GMOP, that was my plan exactly... maybe I should get rid of the plexiglass cover and allow for some air movement, maybe its just stagnant air thats causing the smell.

BTW, I think "shrimp" and "shrimps" are accepted plural forms of shrimp, no?

AaronT

Yeah, I would try it without the cover. Having it almost sealed is a good way to have things go anaerobic without pumping air into it. If it's open top with minimal light, evaporation is not a huge issue. One of our club members had a similar setup to me with a bunch of 2.5's and he had no lights whatsoever. Whatever ambient light was in the room sustained the javamoss. He did feed, but not often...maybe once or twice a week.

No, "shrimps" is not a word in the same manner that "deers" is not a word. I think the whole "shrimps" thing got started by some of our members who don't speak English as a first language (understandable) and then got adopted by others everywhere.

baj

Dont want to get sidetracked here, but I agree with your analogy with deer. However, calling pl. shrimp as shrimps need not have started at this website, for instance, dictionary.com lists shrimp and shrimps as accepted plural forms, and so does the crappy dictionary on MS Word (American English dictionary), and on MSN Encarta as well. Further more a cursory glance into a google search result reveals that the word "shrimps" is used to describe many shrimp in both Canadian and Australian (mostly native english speaking countries) govt websites and in many US marine research websites (Lousiana for eg.) as well. Therefore it is not strange to see on http://www.answers.com/topic/america...sh-differences, under grammar differences between american and british english, that "Differences in which nouns are the same in both their plural and singular forms, such as the word sheep. In American English, shrimp is such a word, but in British English the plural of shrimp is shrimps. (Shrimps is occasionally heard in the southern U.S., but is otherwise rare....". But I agree that shrimps sounds strange to those who dont use that word often, same as many fish are still fish and not fishes (for eg. I ate fish for breakfast lunch and dinner yesterday, so I ate fish yesterday, not "fishes")* or "there are different types of fish in the ocean", but as long as we understand each other.....
Now back to more goofing off at work......

* please note - I didnt eat fish for breakfast, lunch and dinner yesterday.