# plants for opae ula tank (brackish water)



## Jen8560 (Jul 30, 2013)

Hi, first time posting on this site 

I'm redoing a shrimp tank for my mother (she loves looking at them but hates anything to do with tank maintenance--go figure, messing around with the filter ever few weeks is part of the fun of having a fish tank). We're going to go with the Hawaiian opae ula shrimp since those are pretty much the only hands-off maintenance shrimp there are. 

I'm looking at a couple different aquascaping designs, but since one of the possibilities is returning to a planted tank in brackish water, I was wondering if there were any recommendations for brackish plants? 

Fluval 8gal shrimp tank
substrate: tbd based on aquascaping plan
lighting: excellent, medium-high light will be on for ~10-12hours/day


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## ProduceGuy (Mar 8, 2013)

From what I understand, no plants will survive for very long in brackish water. Many claim to have brackish water plants, but they will eventually rot and pollute your tank.

There is a Microalgae you can get that lives and grows well in brackish. I got mine from Petshrimp.com. Got my brackish snails there too.


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## Jen8560 (Jul 30, 2013)

Thanks for the info! I will look at doing some other aquascaping for the tank then. I will check out the microalgae and see what they have, I've bought malawa shrimps from that site before and they turned out great


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## Julianzh (Jul 28, 2011)

I just finished eating at a sushi restaurant and this is their opae ula tank with microalgae


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## mordalphus (Jun 23, 2010)

Lol, I've got some special "macro algae" for you... Only 20 dollars per golf ball... 

Also have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale if you'd like that! 


Just set up the aquarium, and don't fill it with store bought hair algae, that will come all by itself in time (not to mention it's a nuisance).

Also, a word of warning, filamentous algae (like hair algae or spirogyra, clado, etc) can injure and trap shrimp to death. I wouldn't purposely put it in any aquarium.


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## Dan's85 (Mar 18, 2013)

I have read that java moss and java fern can tolerate low salinity. Not sure how true it is, but you might look into it


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## Rob in Puyallup (Jul 2, 2009)

Chaetomorpha macro algae is great, and some species of caulerpa are very good in brackish conditions. 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S III using Tapatalk 2


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## Koi Kameon (Apr 25, 2010)

*Google "plants for brackish water tanks"*

You will find that many will do just fine at 1.005. The mosses all tolerate it. The nanas do fine. I know this bc I have a brackish tank for my brackish crab for almost two years. Marimo and java fern are fine up to 1.008 or even 1.010 sometimes. If you keep the salinity higher than that for you HRS, then you will just be "decorating" with algae from what I hear. Which is fine.


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