Zen Shrimp Tank Journal

[julzhull]

I'm fairly new to this forum but thought a journal here would be a fun way to keep track of my new shrimp tank.  I set one up a year ago and failed miserably.  It was a 7 gallon nano sky and the dimensions (and equipment) of the tank led to many issues.  It ended up full of snails, overgrown moss, algae and only one baby shrimp.  Over the past month I have set up a new tank I got on Black Friday (Mr. Aqua 13.3 gallon bowfront).  This was a steal since it was on sale at a local store and they don't make these anymore.  Plus I love bowfronts.  It allowed me to get the aquascaping that I really wanted but couldn't with the dimensions of my old tank.

So far this tank houses 4 hasbrosus corydoras, 1 baby longfin albino bristlenose (he'll just stay in until he gets bigger and cleans up my algae), one nerite snail, and one baby orange shrimp.  I think the shrimp is still in there, I haven't seen it since the day I put it in but it was pretty small.  I'm going to do orange shrimp and hasbrosus corydoras in this tank.  I think they should be able to cohabitate fairly well.  My next step is to introduce a few more corydoras and then wait a month or so and I'm going to introduce some more orange shrimp and hopefully get a colony started in there.  I wasn't able to do it successfully before but I think I'm a little more well equipped to do it now.

For plants I have a large amazon sword that I pulled from another tank, this will ultimately be replaced with a needle leaf java fern (when I find one large enough or when this plant gets too big).  I have some flame moss in the front growing out and a larger plate of flame moss in the back that you can't see that is about 1/2-1" tall.  I have some brown crypt plants in the back right corner along with a small piece of needle leaf java fern.  On the piece of wood I have a few anubias nana petite that I glued on. I do have some algae going in there but the pleco is doing an awesome job of clearing it off the sword plant and the glass.

 

My theme for this was to get a river effect, I think I was successful enough for my enjoyment.  We have extremely low pH in our water so I mixed some coral in with some course sand for the river part.