Is it possible to grow aquarium plants in sand substrate? Some say yes, same say no… keep reading to find out how I set up a 20-gallon jungle style tank using two kinds of sand!
Topics include:
▶ Preparing the aquarium
▶ Experiment to test sand substrate with plants
▶ Setting up the equipment
▶ My plan for cycling with live plants
In the next video about this tank, I’ll cover how I selected, purchased, and added live aquarium plants to create a jungle paradise for my shy fish.
Ever wonder how long it takes for baby cherry shrimp to hatch? Or how the female’s eggs get fertilized? Keep reading to learn about the amazing life cycle of a cherry shrimp!
When I started keeping shrimp, everyone online just said, “Oh, throw some together and you’ll have hundreds in no time!” Yeah, but how long is that supposed to take? I delved deeper into the freshwater shrimp community, and I found very few resources describing how cherry shrimp breed. I mean, if I don’t know exactly how they reproduce, how do I know if I’m doing something wrong? So today I’m going to tell you the story of a little girl shrimp and a little boy shrimp and how they make babies.
How to Sex Shrimp and Determine if They're Male or Female
Okay, let’s start with adults and how to sex them. If you have 10 shrimp, there’s like a 99.8% chance you’ll have at least 1 male and 1 female, so start with at least 10-20 shrimp to ensure you have enough viable breeding pairs. Now this may vary a little between the different color morphs of Neocaridina davidi, but at least for red cherry shrimp:
Female:
Larger in size, about 1” or 2.5 cm
Redder, darker, or more solid in coloration
May have a white or yellow saddle on their back (which are undeveloped eggs in the ovaries right behind the head of the shrimp
May be carrying eggs under their tail
Often has a curved, rounder underbelly (especially if they've been pregnant before)
Male:
Smaller, about 2/3"-3/4” or 2 cm
Almost transparent in color with red markings
Tail is thinner (similar to a juvenile's tail)
Difficult to see, but has special reproductive structures on the first two pairs of swimmerets
How do Cherry Shrimp Reproduce?
So if you have shrimp of opposite genders, stable water conditions, and plenty of yummy food, the female will develop eggs in her “saddle” where her ovaries are located. Once the eggs ripen, the female will molt her exoskeleton, which looks like a clearish-white shrimp shell that’s completely empty inside. Her new exoskeleton will be soft and flexible, which makes fertilization with the male possible. (Pro tip: make sure your shrimp have plenty of nutrients and minerals to successfully molt if you want to see babies.)
After the female molts, she’s feeling pretty vulnerable with her new soft shell, so to avoid being eaten, she goes into hiding and then releases pheromones or a chemical signal into the water as a signal to the males that she’s ready do the funky monkey dance. So if you see a ton of male shrimp frantically swimming around the tank, instead of passively grazing for food, you know that they’re looking for that newly molted female. And if you see a couple of shrimp that look like they’re “fighting” but there’s no food around, it might be a breeding pair gettin' busy. (Pro tip: make sure not to cull too many males or they’ll have a hard time catching the female right after her molt.)
Shrimp sex is very fast and supposedly occurs less than 10 seconds. The male latches onto the female such that they're facing one another other, deposits his sperm in the female’s genital opening, and then quickly releases her. At this point, the female’s eggs will pass through the deposited sperm as they travel from the ovaries inside her to the outside of her body under her tail. Therefore if you see a female that is “berried,” or holding eggs under her abdomen, then the eggs are definitely fertilized.
Fertilized shrimp eggs rather large (about 1 mm in diameter) and look yellow or green in color. A transparent, ribbon-like membrane binds the eggs to the female’s swimmerets, and she uses the rear ones to fan the eggs, clean off any bacteria or fungus, and increase oxygen flow. Depending on the temperature of the water, the eggs may hatch anywhere from 15 to 35 days. Other sources say 2 to 3 weeks, so that’s a pretty wide range. The closer the eggs get to maturity, you may notice little black dots in the eggs, which are the baby shrimps’ eyes.
What do Baby Cherry Shrimp Look Like?
When they’re ready to come out, the mom will help the baby by kicking at the egg, so it almost looks like the hatchling flies out like popcorn. Unlike other types of shrimp, Neocaridina shrimp lack a larval stage, so the babies look like itty-bitty, clear versions of the adult shrimp, about 2 mm in length and less than 1 mm in height.
The hatchlings aren’t very mobile at this point since their swimming appendages don’t work properly yet, so they’ll basically latch on to the first thing they find and then try to hide among the rocks and plants as they graze on biofilm. (Pro tip: consider adding plenty of hiding spots and feeding a powdered baby shrimp food to supplement the biofilm.) So don’t worry if your female suddenly “loses” her eggs; most likely the babies are just hiding for the first 3-4 days.
How Many Babies Can Each Female Shrimp Make?
Each berried female usually produces about 21-51 babies per batch, supposedly on the higher side if the female is larger, probably because she can produce and hold more eggs.
How Long Does It Take for Cherry Shrimp to Reach Sexual Maturity?
I’ve heard anywhere from 2.5 months (when scientists kept them at 80°F or 27°C), all the way to four to six months. As I mentioned before, the female will be a little less than 1” in length (2.3 cm) and the male will be maybe two-thirds to three-quarters of an inch (a little less than 2 cm).
What is the Life Span of Cherry Shrimp?
In general, the expected total lifespan of cherry shrimp is 1-2 years. I’ve noticed that my oldest, largest females do not tend to carry eggs very often compared to my younger, smaller females. (Pro tip: don’t buy the biggest shrimp you see because they may be too old to breed.)
Don’t you hate having to constantly battle algae? Keep watching for an easy, step-by-step maintenance routine to getting rid of algae and preventing it from coming back!
Note: this is just a starting point to help beginners who need general, actionable advice on how to begin tackling their algae problems. Every aquarium is different, so in a future video, I'll cover the longer process of how to balance and fine-tune a planted tank's parameters.
It’s a harsh world out there for new fish keepers. 😲 Hope you enjoy my second comedy sketch for the “Fish Room Lolz” series! (True story: for the longest time, I was afraid of telling anyone online the size of my aquariums.)
What are some good ways to help and encourage beginners in the fish keeping hobby? Comment below to share your ideas because I’d love to hear them. Take time to enjoy your aquariums and I’ll see you next time!
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel for practical fish care tips for busy aquarists and follow me on Instagram for more updates! 🎮❤️🐟
You know the saying, “bigger is better”? Well, some of us don’t have the space to keep a huge aquarium or tons of tanks. Keep reading for some creative aquarium setup ideas if you’re constrained to a maximum of 20 gallons like me.
I currently own 3 “nano tanks” – the biggest of which only holds 20 gallons. In my family, my husband Mr. Gamer is a collector of All. Sorts. Of. Things. And I’m more of a minimalist, so I don’t really have the space or even desire to get a larger aquarium right now. However, that means I’ve had to get pretty creative when it comes to optimizing the enjoyment I get from my 20-gallon tank. Like many of you, I get bored with my setups. I want to try new fish, new plants, new equipment… but I’m limited to the same size glass box. So here are four different ideas of what I’ve kept in a 20-gallon tank over the years – the good, the bad, and the ugly!
Tank Setup #1: Community Tank for Beginners
My first setup was a basic community tank inspired by the beautiful aquascapes I saw on Pinterest. It used natural-looking fake plants from PetSmart and black gravel, which was eventually replaced with black sand. For stocking, we've got albino cory catfish as bottom dwellers, neon tetras in the middle, and then marbled hatchetfish up top. The hatchetfish promptly died of ich, which is when I learned the importance of quarantine.
So I replaced them with another top level swimmer, furcatus or forktail rainbowfish. Very lively and entertaining, but I didn’t realize that smaller Pseudomugil rainbowfish tend to have shorter lifespans. The centerpiece fish was a German blue ram, which eventually died because they like hotter temperatures above 80°F. Other centerpiece fish I kept at various times included a honey gourami and a male betta fish, who did surprisingly well in a community tank and actually stopped biting his tail once he had other tankmates to distract him.
This tank crashed because of improper quarantine that introduced a fast-killing disease called columnaris. Awesome. I’ll make an article on treating columnaris in the future, but by the time I figured out what it was, almost everything had died.
Tank Setup #2: Axolotl Aquarium
I seriously wanted to rage quit the hobby at this point. All that time and money poured into this aquarium obsession, and I was left emotionally drained. This is when I left the fish world and took my detour into keeping axolotls. Still kept the same fake plant decor, but had a totally new set of challenges with keeping the water cold and clean enough. After my experiences, I would recommend only keeping one adult axolotl in a 20-gallon tank because of their heavy bioload, and even then, a 20 gallon long aquarium is preferred. But, if you’re looking for an unusual underwater alternative to fish, give axolotls a try because they’re super cool and very derpy.
Tank Setup #3: Planted Tank for Beginners
After my axolotls passed away, I took another long break before starting tank setup #3 – the beginner planted aquarium! The decorations consisted of seiryu stone and spiderwood as the hardscape, as well as easy live aquarium plants like anubias and java fern. No more collectoritis for me – this tank focused on three fish species: a school of albino cory catfish, a school of green neon tetras, and a honey gourami as the centerpiece (plus some amano shrimp as the algae clean-up crew). If you’re looking for fun breeding projects that aren’t livebearers, the cory catfish and honey gouramis were both fairly easy to breed, and I quickly grew the number of fish I owned.
After a year with this setup, I was ready to try something new! Got my first-time experience selling fish and plants at my local club auction, which was really exciting and I was happy to see them go to other hobbyists who will take care of them.
Tank Setup #4: "Shy Guys" Jungle Tank
Today I’m currently on setup #4 with this 20-gallon aquarium – the Shy Guys jungle tank. I’ll go into more detail in future posts on my plant selection and stocking choices, but given my struggles with algae in a tank full of slow-growing plants like anubias, I wanted to try creating a more heavily planted jungle-style aquarium using some faster-growing, beginner plants. I also deliberately chose fish and invertebrates that are all considered super shy (hence the “Shy Guys” theme) because there are certain species I’ve always wanted to try but I heard they hide all the time. So what would happen if I got a whole aquarium of timid creatures? Hmm…
In the future, I have many more plans for this tank. I’d like to do more breeding projects, or perhaps keep some coldwater fish, or maybe once this tank is really established and good at growing plants – try to do a planted axolotl tank? I’m kind of torn since axolotls can live a really long time, so I don’t want to get one until I’ve kept some of my bucket list nano fish… or until I’m able to get another tank. 😉
Question of the Day
Let me know in the comments below what aquarium themes or stocking ideas you would recommend trying in a 20-gallon tank. As always, take time to enjoy your aquariums and I’ll see you in the next post!
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel for practical fish care tips for busy aquarists and follow me on Instagram for more updates! 🎮❤️🐟
