Hey, everyone.
It's Cory from Aquarium Co-op.
Today I want to show you how I'm breeding cherry shrimp.
Now I do it the same way in every tank.
This is a tank I set up specifically to do the cherry shrimp, and it's been a long time
in the making and today, it's time to shoot the video.
So let's take a look.
So down here, we have a basic 20-gallon tank.
Initially, I put up some substrate in there, didn't matter.
Then I put a sponge filter in and that's what I use.
There, I use a sponge filter.
I always try to use sponge filters.
If I'm gonna use a hang on back, I will use something that has a sponge on the intake
so it doesn't suck up the babies.
From there, I want to grow a ton of algae.
So that's the goal, is get tons and tons and tons of algae growing.
Maybe it would be something like this tank up here, where you've got algae all around.
That's exactly what cherry shrimp want to feed on.
They want to live off that algae.
So when you have that going on in there, it works out really nice.
So I got that going, I put a sprig of moss in there.
This is Christmas moss, I believe.
But it could be java moss, can be anything.
Just live plants in general doesn't really matter, you know.
In this tank over here, that I'm breeding blue velvets.
We've got some dwarf aquarium lilies and stuff like that.
But I did put a cycle sponge in there, but that sponge was from a dirty filter, okay,
and what I did is I brought it in and I rung it out in there so that brown mold went all
over everything.
The tank looked terrible for about three days, and that was to seed the aquarium so that
it could get enough bacteria and things going so that shrimp would be able to thrive in
there, and that's what shrimp want to eat.
Shrimp want to eat bacteria, microscopic algae, microscopic organisms and stuff like that.
So in my opinion, shrimp do best in a symbiotic relationship.
Now what does that mean?
That means that they rely on something else.
I find they do best when they can eat on fish poop.
The problem is everyone would say, "Well, fish eat shrimp."
That's true, it's a great food source for the fish as well.
So we have to create an environment that makes it so that the shrimp can get away from the
predators.
So in here, I've got teacup platys at the moment.
Those actually went in, I want to say about a week after the shrimp.
It just so happens the way I bought them, wasn't any reason.
Normally, I would actually start with the first, actually, just because I like them
to start pooping and creating what the shrimp are gonna want to eat but as far as the tank
setup goes, that's how I set it up.
I run a sting ray light, so just a lower LED light.
It doesn't really matter, we're only growing some moss here.
And I'm running AutoFeeder on and it doesn't feed very much at all.
You're better to underfeed than overfeed.
When you use fish, you have to feed them enough so that they aren't preying too much on the
shrimp, but we've made, if we look down here, we've made an environment.
And if you see, this is algae on the glass, and I don't clean that off on purpose because
when you start looking around, there's not much algae at all in this tank because they're
consuming it.
So any algae I can grow I actually want them, it's kind of a feeding patch.
They can come over here and feed on this if they want.
But we've got the moss here, and I've actually got a pest's thing in there.
This is bladderwort.
I don't like to have it in my moss, but I'm not willing to tear all the moss out yet either,
so it's an unfortunate thing.
It's just kind of a pest and you gotta take it out and it's hard to get out from moss.
But it doesn't impact the snails or anything like that or the shrimp.
But what we see here is we got fish and they're living right next to the shrimp.
You can see we've got cherry shrimp in there and some are buried and things like that.
We've also got baby fish and you can see because the moss has made it so that baby fish can
thrive, that also means that the shrimp can thrive, and the more surface area you have,
the better.
So that's why I like that sponge is really good.
Also this challah wood, that's that type of wood is there, it's really good.
You see there's more babies in the back there.
But when it comes to cherry shrimp, females are going to be very colored up whereas males
typically don't have as much color.
Now that's a pretty clear male there.
You can get him with much more color, but when you're looking at a store, don't choose
just all the brightest red ones or you're gonna get pretty much all females.
You see, there are more fry of the platys there.
But you're gonna get all females if you choose only the brightest and reddest.
Like that's probably a male right there but more color, obviously.
Now you can also kinda sex them by the shape of the abdomen on the shrimp.
So this is a female here and that abdomen there is much bulkier because that's where
it stores the eggs, would it, is carrying them to hatch whereas a male, if I can find
another male around here, a male's gonna be much more slender in that area.
Now here's a female and she's actually carrying eggs, I believe.
Yeah, you can see that little bit of gold color in her, let's see if we can keep zooming
in here.
That gold color underneath the shell, that's actually a batch of eggs.
They'll carry those for about 30 days or so.
See how close we can get in here without- oh, we're losing it.
That's as close as I can get there, but that's a female carrying eggs.
Now, that's gonna give birth to maybe 30 babies or something like that and, yes, will the
platys eat some of them?
Sure, but the goal is to get so many going, we start looking in here, you're going, "Wow,
that's a lot of shrimp kicking around."
And getting really thriving.
Now let me do some moss moving here, see if we can show more.
Usually for every shrimp you can see, there's 10 you're not seeing and here, there's a lot
of Malaysian Trumpet Snails.
A lot of people think they're gonna take too much away from the babies and stuff like that,
but as far as I'm concerned, it's all a beneficial ecosystem I've made and that's the goal, is
I'm trying to make an ecosystem where you've got lots of organisms living in harmony and
relying on each other because things like these Malaysian Trumpet Snails are eating
any undigested food but when they poop it out, it's the perfect food for the baby shrimp
and you can see.
Since I rarely ever get in here, they aren't even that scared of me, cause I don't, it's
not like I'm hunting them but shrimp tend to always dart backwards.
When you touch them in the front, they dart backwards.
So if you're ever trying to net them, touch them with your finger up front and put the
net behind them and there they go.
There's that male I was, one of the males.
If we can zoom in on him, you can see how his abdomen- Oh, he's gonna land on me, he's
on me at the moment.
Terrible lighting, but you can see how his abdomen is more slender than the females that
have the eggs.
But you can see here how if you have lots of moss and when you start really looking
around, like start looking back here, if I pull some of this moss out forward, you're
gonna see more and more babies and that's the goal.
The goal is to create this wonderland of moss and things like that and all this surface
area so that the shrimp can really thrive and that's the goal.
That's how you do it and so I want to take you over and I want to show you the orange
cherry shrimp tank.
I'm also gonna show you the blue velvet tank.
They're all the same type, so blue velvet, oranges and cherries are all the same types
of shrimp, just different color variants.
Now over here, this is- I got these at the same time as I got the reds.
Now these haven't been breeding quite as much for me.
There's also no AutoFeeder so I feed this tank manually and we got the blues in here
and you can see them swimming around and if you look in the moss, there's, they're in
the moss as well.
But the big difference here is the amount of food that's going into this tank.
There's less food because there's not an AutoFeeder so we've got less moss.
You can kinda get a top view of here, you can see they're all kinda swimming around
and doing their thing.
I started each tank, each tank started with ten adults, okay, and in here, we've got some
Japanese rice fish.
They're not producing any babies because the shrimp are probably eating their eggs but
this was kind of a quarantine setup and I want to put these outside during the winter
or during the summer 'cause it's winter right now.
I also have a bristlenose in here which does not affect raising shrimp at all which is
good because shrimp are livebearers.
When they do hatch out from the females, they're gonna hatch out in just a baby shrimp but
that's also what makes them tasty for any fish.
So I'm trying to see if I have any buried blue ones in here, like, clearly the colony
is expanding.
There's no doubt about that, there's much more than ten.
But it's not as big as the one over here yet.
So here we have a 40-gallon breeder.
It's got an AutoFeeder on it and we keep orange shrimp in here as well as the panda-blue guppies.
Now for the plants, we didn't use any moss in this one.
It's all anubias which is this big mass up here and then we've got bolbitis which is
an African fern.
We also breed plecos in this same tank because it's 40 gallon so we got pleco babies, we
got lots of babies for the panda guppies and we've got lots of shrimp babies.
You see, shrimp are pretty much everywhere.
I got so many orange shrimp and I put a few algae wafers in here just to bring 'em out.
But you can see how all these things are pretty much living in harmony.
We've made an ecosystem once again.
Snails are part of this ecosystem, plants are part of this ecosystem, and yes, are the
guppies are probably eating some of the shrimp fry?
Most definitely, I'm sure of it.
Could it possibly be that some eggs get eaten from snails and things like that for the bristlenose?
Could be.
But you know, that's how nature does it.
Nature's gonna put all these things together, and we're gonna raise some of everything,
all right?
And that's what we've done here, we've got some babies of every type of animal that we
have living in here, already producing which is a good thing in my opinion.
So it helps really digest everything.
There's not much algae.
There's a little bit of hair algae there, but in terms of the diatom algae, they really
like on the glass, there's not a speck left just because there's, you can see- where'd
that little baby pleco go?
Right there, that little baby pleco is scrounging around looking for algae and you can see they're
smaller than the shrimp but that's, that is how I like to breed shrimp and I can do it
in lots and lots and lots of tanks.
That's, you know, there's not too many tanks that don't have shrimp.
If I look at another tank right over here, we've got some guppies I brought in.
This is a new strain to me.
We got them living here, but then we also have shrimp breeding in the tanks.
We have more orange shrimp.
You can see there's lot of plants, and that's just kind of my general approach.
Give it lots of plants, build an ecosystem.
If you build the ecosystem right, they will reproduce for you.
Sometimes when you have, let's say, hitchhikers, like I had some hitchhiker shrimp in here,
they're not reproducing nearly as fast because there's not enough cover.
See here, we've got orange shrimp, we've got lots of neon tetras.
This is a holding tank for the store and back there, you can see we've got a orange shrimp.
Now that's a saddled female, so that orange thing on the back means that it's ready to
breed.
They're just not breeding yet, and I suspect it's because there's not really enough cover,
really, in this tank.
Now, could I make it that way?
Yeah, but then it's gonna be too hard to catch the neons that I'm specifically keeping this
tank for so, you know, you design the ecosystem with a purpose and then you run it that way.
I hope that answers your questions on how to breed cherry shrimp.
You've seen three different strains of cherry shrimp.
The blue velvets, the oranges and the cherry shrimp.
They're all bred in the same fashion for me, they're all bred in community tanks.
You can definitely start by keeping them in just their own tank like, let's say a ten-gallon
or something like that and just the shrimp, but realize, I find an ecosystem does much
better because if you overfeed a little bit, the snails might help eat that food for you.
Also, the snail poop and the fish poop are also beneficial.
It helps us break things down more and more and more and the more stable you can get a
system, the better.
Now I have all these tanks on auto-water change.
They change about 20% once a day or so.
You can do that much less.
In fact, I've had shrimp tanks that I haven't changed water on in a year before, but my
whole fish room here is on a system where it automatically changes water but what they
want, they want consistency and they want to be stable.
They don't want radical changes, that stops them from breeding so I try to kinda set it
and forget it.
Let happen what's gonna happen.
Let the algae grow, let everything happen, you know.
You can't let ammonia build up or something like that, but anything else that's not technically
harmful to them, let it happen and nature will work its way through it so hope that
helps, check out our other breeding videos, check out the channel in general.
If you haven't subscribed yet, you should.
Put out lots of content.
If you like this video, go ahead and like it, and we'll see you in the next one.
Thanks for watching.
If you want to see more shrimp content, I've got some of the way back content when the
fish room was still new.
I think it was episode number 14 where I took this orange cherry shrimp colony out of the
tank.
You know, it's thousands of shrimp so I'll put a link up above, it'll be a little card
that comes out.
You just click on that and it'll port you right over to that video.
At about 10 minutes in, it's amazing.
-if you want, but, so as I'm taking the guppy grass out, I'm literally taking some shrimp
also, but, you know, that's, that's a lot of shrimp right there, I mean, that's a lot.
I don't know what that number is, but if someone paused this video and...