# Self-sustaining Shrimp Tank



## diwu13 (Sep 20, 2011)

Yes perfectly possible. This can be done without a airstone or a filter. Lighting is essential though. I suggest you go to the "Planted Nano Tank" section of this forum and look up "Newman's Shrimp bowls". This guy created two bowls that are completely self sufficient. Only time he does water changes is when he needs to trip the plants, other besides that he doesn't even need to look at the tank. Pretty cool though.

I doubt you'd be able to do it with 10 gallons since the nitrogen needed for the plants to grow, you'd need like TONS of shrimp. Both his shrimp bowls are under 4 gallons I believe.


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## Newman (Jul 3, 2010)

haha, you give me too much credit, as other people have made more self sufficient bowls since I started mine. I think the member by the name of madness has made two of his bowls in exactly the way you described and they are both doing fine! He hasnt even trimmed them yet.

I do a water change on mine from time to time because i keep crystals in it. if you used cherries you could get away with no water changes, just periodic feeding (the shrimp need to get their iodine, calcium and other stuff from somewhere because they deplete it from their initial water supply.)

I agree lighting is what powers the bowl/ planted tank.


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## diwu13 (Sep 20, 2011)

Newman would you agree that a self sustaining bowl wouldn't be possible with 10 gallons? Or do you think it would be possible with a larger shrimp population?


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## Newman (Jul 3, 2010)

you would probably have to do maintenance on it at some point...the startup is the tricky part because once the plants grow out too much they'll start to die off or even collect algae...
the number of shrimp will likely rise at the start if using neocaridinas, but maybe it can level off without crashing? i'm really not 100% sure, it would be an interesting experiment to try. there are self sustaining tanks out there somewhere, i remember reading about and looking at some of them...but the truth about them is blurry and we don't really see them around a lot...
I'd say try it but put a lot of research and planning into it. you'd have to know the biology/behavior of the plants and shrimp you want to you to make it work without any maintenance.


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## jasonpatterson (Apr 15, 2011)

diwu13 said:


> Newman would you agree that a self sustaining bowl wouldn't be possible with 10 gallons? Or do you think it would be possible with a larger shrimp population?


I have a hard time understanding why a larger tank would be more difficult. In any case, I kept cherries in a 10 gallon planted with micro swords and ludwigia repens that I only fed every week or two, when I remembered. They were perfectly happy and bred freely until I tore it down. I don't know how often I actually needed to feed them, it was more a habit than anything. I do know for certain that if you remove anything from the tank you'll have to replace it in some way, so if you're ever going to trim plants you'll likely have to feed the shrimp.


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## ProjectCode619 (Oct 29, 2011)

szenic said:


> Just wondering if it's possible with a heavily planted 10gal with airstone, filter, heater, and light. Would it possible to just top it off with water every now and then without any further maintenance?


szenic,

Depends on which shrimps you have. I do the same thing for my cherry shrimp tank and they breed like rabbits. As long as ammonia is 0 you are good to go. I don't even have airstones.


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## diwu13 (Sep 20, 2011)

jasonpatterson said:


> I have a hard time understanding why a larger tank would be more difficult. In any case, I kept cherries in a 10 gallon planted with micro swords and ludwigia repens that I only fed every week or two, when I remembered. They were perfectly happy and bred freely until I tore it down. I don't know how often I actually needed to feed them, it was more a habit than anything. I do know for certain that if you remove anything from the tank you'll have to replace it in some way, so if you're ever going to trim plants you'll likely have to feed the shrimp.


Does your 10 gallon have a filter/bubbler? When I was referring to Newman's bowl it has nothing besides substrate, plants, and shrimp. That was what I mean by self sustaining. Therefore the more volume you have the more substance the plants requires, since there will be more plants. Therefore you would need more shrimp. With such a large volume of water without a filter/bubbler there would also be areas where the wastes would build up to toxic levels whereas in smaller volumes the plants would more readily use it up.


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## madness (Jul 31, 2011)

diwu13 said:


> Does your 10 gallon have a filter/bubbler? When I was referring to Newman's bowl it has nothing besides substrate, plants, and shrimp. That was what I mean by self sustaining. Therefore the more volume you have the more substance the plants requires, since there will be more plants. Therefore you would need more shrimp. With such a large volume of water without a filter/bubbler there would also be areas where the wastes would build up to toxic levels whereas in smaller volumes the plants would more readily use it up.


I am pretty sure that I have read about filter-less heavily planted tanks - specifically with the Walstad method. The extra water volume should actually make things easier to balance I would think.

Don't quote me on this but I think that wkndracer has a few of his heavily planted 'dirt tanks' running with a power head only (they are 55s I think and need some water circulation).

If you are keeping NeoCaridina the requirements are so much lower than other shrimp and the bio-load is so much smaller than fish that you can get away with filterless and extremely low maintainence set-ups.

I think that Newman's challenges with trying to get his bee shrimp (CRS) to not only survive but breed in his planted bowls demonstrates the flexibility of the NeoCaridina shrimp (Red Cherry Shrimp, yellows, etc.) in comparison to many of the other options. The flexibility in regards to temperature, water hardness, etc. is what makes the shrimp bowls so easy when using Neos rather than bee shrimp or other similar Caridina shrimp.

I guess that someone would need to test with some sort of hardy nano-fish to get a feel for exactly what type of bio-load these heavily planted filter-less tanks can handle.

The potting mix (especially if you put in something with organics rather than previously mineralized top soil) should provide enough nutrients for limited growth for quite a long time so the lack of feeding of the fish/shrimp shouldn't be a huge issue. The extra ammonia/nitrogen is appreciated by the plants I am sure but they will grow without it until the initial volume of minerals that came in the soil is eventually depleted.


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## diwu13 (Sep 20, 2011)

madness said:


> Don't quote me on this but I think that wkndracer has a few of his heavily planted 'dirt tanks' running with a power head only (they are 55s I think and need some water circulation).


Yea, for the larger tanks I meant it will be much harder without the use of anything to circulate the water whereas in the smaller tanks you do not need anything to provide growth and sustain the bioload as well.


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## szenic (Aug 15, 2011)

Thanks for all the replies!  I have yellows and OEBT in the tank. I guess I'll have to continue water changes due to the tigers, though my tests always come up 0 and my tank is very heavily planted.


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## Newman (Jul 3, 2010)

i think that you should also keep doing the water changes on your tank. i once stopped doing water changes on my 10 gallon iwagumi for 6 whole months! (I had that two years ago) Then i did one water change, and the entire tank exploded...
with algae and then died. lol it didn't die but i did take it down a few months after that.


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## 10gallonplanted (Oct 31, 2010)

I haven't done a water change on my bowl in three weeks and it has two guppies and some RCS. I think that even these bowls are more stable than you think. I feed the two guppies everyday and I have no aglae. The bowl is only one gallon too. 
I think as long as you have the bowl very heavily planted you can add a few fish along with your shrimp.


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## 10gallonplanted (Oct 31, 2010)

I might even add another guppy just to really push what these bowls can handle.


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## chiefroastbeef (Feb 14, 2011)

I barely do any maintenance to my tank, clean the filter once a month, top off water. I don't use ferts. Water change once a month or longer. My fish and cherries are doing just great. I also have a heavily planted tank.


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## Newman (Jul 3, 2010)

yes heavily planted tanks do cut down on maintenance but there is still some maintenance involved on bigger tanks.

Whenever i talk about keeping a bowl or even a small reef tank(to be extreme), i am interested in the long term success of such a tank not just how terrific it does in the first few months of its life. things do sometimes go wrong over longer periods of time such as algae blooms. Often if a tank's methodology allows the owner to keep it going well over a year means that the method might work!

I don't think my bowl is even a year old yet, so i can't say if my methods work, but many Walstad bowls before mine have been running for a very long time, so there are ways to make these work with either low maintenance or no maintenance lol!


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## madness (Jul 31, 2011)

Newman said:


> yes heavily planted tanks do cut down on maintenance but there is still some maintenance involved on bigger tanks.
> 
> Whenever i talk about keeping a bowl or even a small reef tank(to be extreme), i am interested in the long term success of such a tank not just how terrific it does in the first few months of its life. things do sometimes go wrong over longer periods of time such as algae blooms. Often if a tank's methodology allows the owner to keep it going well over a year means that the method might work!
> 
> I don't think my bowl is even a year old yet, so i can't say if my methods work, but many Walstad bowls before mine have been running for a very long time, so there are ways to make these work with either low maintenance or no maintenance lol!


One benefit (that we hopefully don't have to take advantage of) is that one of these bowls could be cleared out and replanted in an hour. The 'risk' of a failing eco-system is a lot smaller than with a regular sized tank.


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## Newman (Jul 3, 2010)

that is very true.

man i want to start another bowl again lol. my shallow 1 gallon one...


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## madness (Jul 31, 2011)

Newman said:


> that is very true.
> 
> man i want to start another bowl again lol. my shallow 1 gallon one...


I am likely going to be doing a 10 gallon with a specially designed MTS recipe in order to 'beta test' it and I have been debating either doing another bowl or changing one of mine over as well to test it on the small scale. This particular MTS recipe would theoretically have enough nutrients/mineral content to last a very long time in a bowl.

I already have 7 tanks though (plus the two bowls).


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## Newman (Jul 3, 2010)

lol i know what you mean, i have 5 tanks total including my bowl. when i move soon i'll only take 3 of those with me and grow the tank collection from that lol.


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## szenic (Aug 15, 2011)

You have made me want to try doing a 1gallon bowl... though it won't be a bowl because what I have is the aqueon 1gal bowfront that just has some moss floating in it atm. Shape shouldnt matter though right? I have some MTS that I could use, and then I saw that Newman caps it with sand? And would snowball shrimp be ok for this? Are they as hardy as cherries?


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## madness (Jul 31, 2011)

szenic said:


> You have made me want to try doing a 1gallon bowl... though it won't be a bowl because what I have is the aqueon 1gal bowfront that just has some moss floating in it atm. Shape shouldnt matter though right? I have some MTS that I could use, and then I saw that Newman caps it with sand? And would snowball shrimp be ok for this? Are they as hardy as cherries?


Shape doesn't matter (from what I have read) to the planted bowls. If you had some really oddly shaped container (like really tall and thin) it might be a problem but the bowfront should be fine.

You can get pool filter sand cheap at Home Depot or Lowes and cap it with that. I used Tahitian Moon Sand just because I had some left over from other tanks.

Snowballs should be fine I think.


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## Fishly (Jan 8, 2010)

Topsoil is great, even if you don't mineralize it. Just make sure you sift it beforehand and cap it with a coarse sand. If you're worried about the shrimp getting the minerals they need, I would add some of Nikki's mineral rock to the tank.

I have a large kritter keeper (~3g) with 4 guppies and tons of fry. All the plants in it are wild-caught, and it's been going for over a year. The last water change was 2 or 3 months ago to get rid of green water. Now that the plants have filled in, there are some diatoms and GSA, but you can see through the tank. That's one thing that's hard to beat with low-maintenance tanks: algae. Natural aquatic habitats have a decent amount of algae, so if your tank is its own ecosystem, don't expect it to sparkle like an ADA showpiece.

I don't do regular maintenance on any of my tanks, and because of it, the only ones that are really thriving are those that are thickly planted. It doesn't really matter what size the tank is, as long as the plants are healthy and the fish are getting enough to eat, the tank should work.


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## szenic (Aug 15, 2011)

I also have some miraclegro potting mix, does it need to be sifted if I used it?


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## madness (Jul 31, 2011)

szenic said:


> I also have some miraclegro potting mix, does it need to be sifted if I used it?


No, it does NOT need to be sifted.

Many people like to sift it to avoid the possibility of the wood/bark possibly floating up in the tank and also some people want less organic matter in the soil but it works either way.

I dumped my Miracle Gro Organic Complete potting mix straight out of the bag (well, actually, I scooped it straight out of the bag).

Just make sure you cap it properly and are careful when adding the water and planting and you should eliminate most of the problems that might arise.


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## Fishly (Jan 8, 2010)

madness said:


> No, it does NOT need to be sifted.
> 
> Many people like to sift it to avoid the possibility of the wood/bark possibly floating up in the tank and also some people want less organic matter in the soil but it works either way.


I always sift it because I've read about people finding nails and broken glass in their dirt. Not something I want in my tank, even if it is under sand. I don't want to get cut or stabbed when I tear down a tank.

Sifting soil for a 2.5g is no big deal. Put some window screen or plastic canvas over a bowl, then put a handful of soil on top. Shake it until most of it has fallen through, throw out the remains, then do it again with another handful.


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## szenic (Aug 15, 2011)

So I managed to cap my soil with sand, but there is still some debris floating around in the water after 3 water changes. Is this ok? Or will it harm the shrimp in some way? The debris (i guess just some escaped soil) settles to the bottom after a little time, but comes up if I stir the water. Any advice appreciated!


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## madness (Jul 31, 2011)

szenic said:


> So I managed to cap my soil with sand, but there is still some debris floating around in the water after 3 water changes. Is this ok? Or will it harm the shrimp in some way? The debris (i guess just some escaped soil) settles to the bottom after a little time, but comes up if I stir the water. Any advice appreciated!


I didn't worry about the debris but I didn't add shrimp for a long time after starting the bowl. Not because I was afraid of the water quality but just because I hadn't gotten around to it.

Long-term I don't think the debris will hurt anything but it is possible that it will foul up the water a little bit in the short-term. Sorry I can't offer anything more detailed than that in terms of information.


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## Fishly (Jan 8, 2010)

It won't do any harm. If you want to get rid of it, use a hose to siphon it out.


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## Newman (Jul 3, 2010)

yes dont worry about it, just dont add shrimp too soon. let the bowl/tank sit as planted for a good while, and once you see plants filling the bowl, then its best to add shrimp.

I figured I've thought up of a way to make a self-sustaining shrimp tank. One that will only need top offs and a little feeding of shrimp every now and then:

Bowl
CFL/LED Lamp
Organic soil
Cover Substrate of choice
Plants(dwarf sag and pygmy chain sword are some of the best)
Floating Plants
Neocaridina shrimp(if you have hard tap water)
Caridina shrimp (if you have soft tap or are willing to use RO)
Any type of Food(for shrimp)
A mineral rock/mineral ball(for shrimp)
Top off Water(RO or DI is ideal imo)


Here is some basic reasoning:
Plants need to be ones that do not require much maintenance such as dwarf sag and pygmy chains. stem plants would require constant trimming and uprooting and therefore will be undesirable imo. Floating plants are a must. Salvinia, duckweed, even water lettuce should do the trick.

Shrimp choice should technically be very hardy such as cherries, or maybe bibaulti shrimp if you want something unusual. speaking of caridina, low grade crystals should also be eligible if using RO water to initially setup the bowl (needs RO/DI top off water)
The only maintenance on shrimp would probably be periodic feeding. an almond leaf/ leaves in general can aid feeding. the shrimp will probably not need to be fed all that frequently if they population is kept lower, and the bowl is FULL of plants. 

The mineral rock/ball is the key to not doing water changes (Or so i think) because it should be able to supply all the minerals needed for shrimp to stay healthy. thus the shrimp never use up everything the initial water has to offer- so no need for water changes. if the mineral rock/ball also dissolves minerals, those can also be used by the plants (as all plants need some minerals for growth that can't be found in the soil, probably like magnesium and calcium.)

That should be it. Aside from thinning the shrimp population from time to time (you don't want the bowl to be overpopulated or it may crash), there isn't really much maintenance that needs to be done, just like the OP wanted.
What do you guys think of the plan so far?


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## szenic (Aug 15, 2011)

Thanks everyone for all the great info! Newman, where do I get a mineral rock ball? Also, the shrimp I was thinking of using are mutts crossbred from several caridina species. Would they do okay here? My water hardness is moderate and I dont use RO or DI water. And what's a good population to maintain in this size setup?


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## Newman (Jul 3, 2010)

you can get the mineral rocks anywhere. one source is aquatic magic's website and another would be the Shrimp Lab (which sells both the rock and the mineral ball things.)

Caridina mutts probably can't breed since most hybrid animals from different species are unable to breed. at least that is what happens in the case of fish hybrids...idk much about shrimp hybrids since i have never kept them. As for keeping the shrimp in the tank, they should do fine since they wont reproduce and increase resource demand.
In a 10 gallon tank like you wanted, you could probably do around 10-15 adult shrimp easily. in a 1 gallon bowl I suggest about 3 of them to keep the bioload lower...

it would be interesting if you could try this concept out for us. I may likely even setup one up myself (I have to finish taking down my 10 gal reef first though...)


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## Fishly (Jan 8, 2010)

> Also, the shrimp I was thinking of using are mutts crossbred from several caridina species.


It would depend on your water. Caridina shrimp need very soft water. Whether or not they will breed depends on the species and varieties that produced the hybrids. Most Caridina hybrids are fertile, though.


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## Newman (Jul 3, 2010)

they are? that's interesting... they may be still very close as different species then because once they are absolutely different species, then offspring would be infertile.

Caridina shrimp do need soft water but i think his moderately soft water will be fine. its not like he is trying to breed crystal shrimp =) If the mutt shrimp do breed, that would be cool, but i'm sure it will be just as cool just having them in the tank, living haha.


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