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Movement and Progress
In the realms of breeding shrimp would require persistence and consistency as one would be hit by many obstacles along the way but should never give up. To progress in breeding requires persistence and keep believing when you don’t see results in a year or two.
On the other hand, i have heard some share with me that they’ve invested so much time and effort and also money on shrimps but after 6 months they don’t see results. Movement shouldn’t be confuse with progress. Movement is really about doing the things like water change, resetting tanks, feeding, and the day to day things all these are what i call the hygiene factor. The very fundamental or building block of shrimp breeding and does not equate to progress. We can change water whole day every day but at the end, if we do not progress in selective breeding than it’s just going with the flow.
Progress on the other hand is about taking risk and doing something different than what you are doing currently. It also involves failing but people are afraid of failure and fear of looking like a failure. I think failure should be an option. Without failing you are not even trying, to get something you never had, you have to do something you never did. Trying to see results with 1 tank is going to be difficult because if we would to discuss about selective breeding we should need about 2-3 tanks per type. So by taking risk to expand your setup, investing in good sourced shrimp are some examples of sowing the seeds to progress forward.
Believing when there are no results
This is a really difficult one because people need to see a cause and effect to believe. Hence the term Seeing is Believing. However, in shrimp breeding if you’re unable to see the results in the first cross back are you going to give up? How about selective breeding project not taking root? It’s easy to get discourage in shrimp breeding and not continue on the process of selective breeding. Going back to the drawing board to see where can be improve in the selective breeding process.
Keep working on it and failing and trying again. Getting more tanks, trying and keep trying. So while everyone knows selective breeding is the “Be All End All”, but it takes generation to get there and if you see the goal in front of you and keep trying and improve, i believe you’ll get there one day.
The successful breeders are not the ones that didn’t fail, they are the ones that fail the most, but they believe and keep believing and they are the ones that stood up every time they fall. That separates those that achieve their goals and those who don’t. It’s common to hear this “I don’t have this, i don’t have that, i can’t have this, it’s too difficult, it’s too much for me, it’s impossible, i don’t have the resources, i’m afraid,” Put all these away if you would like to progress because we are what we speak.
We can learn to believe like Shrimp does, they can’t see their egg develop unlike human where we can see our babies grow bigger in the mother’s tummy. However, shrimps believe that if she keeps fanning her egg, shrimplets will come and although she can’t physically see her clutch, nature made it in such a way that she knows even without seeing she will hatch the babies.
It’s hard
Well, there is a saying “if you do the difficult thing in life, life will be easy”. One example would be the honey bee story where they were part of a space experiment being sent up to space to see how 0 gravity affect their flight. When they reach outer space, the bees started to float. They must be thinking, life should be like this, easy floating around effortlessly. I don’t even need to flap my wings, i can float around in life, how wonderful that is. I just drift around and i’ll get to where i want to. Flapping my wings all these while has been tiring!
Eventually, the honey bee die. The bees were not born to float around, they get confuse, orientation got distorted. In other words, doing the difficult thing in life may be difficult but also rewarding.
So we can choose to take the easy route and float around (nothing against that) but do not complain that you don’t see progress on your shrimps. Taking the difficult route and persist on will get you there.
Hope this post would cheer you on to get to where you want to be and as such, it is those things you don’t see that brings you forward. Keep believing.
Why do you need to reset your tank
There are a few reasons that resetting of tank is important and that can be first understood that what i’m referring here is on active soil. Active soil such as ADA/Tropica/platinum/aka/etc are soil that releases ammonia to the water column and also have the ability to lower the pH to an acidic level.
Buffering conditions wear off over time and the ideal state is no longer ideal over a certain period of time. This is one of the major factor influencing why a reset is necessary. The ability to buffer the water parameters like how it should has slow down drastically and visually it can be seen that the shrimps are no longer breeding as much/fast as they should.
A newly laid level of soil also have the strongest buffering condition which helps the eco-system in your tank to be in a much better state where microorganism and biofilm grows quicker than when the soil is near exhausting. Hence, it is important to know the reasons why it is necessary to reset your tanks over time.
When to reset
When buffering conditions become slow, water parameter changes and shrimp do not breed as frequently, shrimplets too don’t grow as quickly as they once would as everything in the tank is related to one another. This lead to the need to change the soil. These are visual appearance that you can probably see and observe.
I have used UGF with a lot of soil and also with tanks with just 1cm of soil, the buffering duration doesn’t appear to be exponentially different. Hence, while there are many methods of shrimp breeding, the one i use and follow is thin layer of soil but to reset more frequently.
Hence there is no hard and fast rule when to change your soil out however what i do is that i use two criteria and if one of them is met, i’ll reset. The first criteria is if the shrimps are no longer breeding as quickly as they should and the tank condition doesn’t appear to be favourable to shrimp breeding, i’ll reset.
Another criteria is when the tank is about 8-10 months old i’ll reset, considering that with a cycling time of 40 days hence it would mean i’ll reset once a year including a 40 days cycling time.
How i reset
A hard reset:
This means all soil plants etc are totally remove including changing out the filter medias everything to be brand new like setting a new tank.
A soft reset:
This is what i do most of the time.
- Remove the shrimps to another tank.
- Remove soil and water
- fill up with new soil and add water
- wash all filter media and change 10% of filter media.
- cycle
A very simple process to reset the tank, without the UGF i could now reset much quicker and not be put off with the time needed to reset the tank.
i have much more success usually after resetting the tank when the water becomes rich again.
Factors delaying resetting of tanks
One of the biggest concern of resetting is where do i house my shrimps when i reset?
There are a few ways to do so, one is to house them in a big breeder box in another tank for some time and if a soft reset is used, the filter media which still have beneficial bacteria will certainly help speed up the cycling process.
Breeder box are not meant to house and breed shrimps long term but are like temporary housing until the shrimps are able to go back to their home.
I have heard and tried it before is to remove the soil partially during water change and adding new soil until 100% of the soil is being totally change out. For example 50% of the soil is vacuum out on the first month, then on the second month another 50% of the soil is removed. However, there are risk to this is because while active soil releases ammonia, it is important to note small shrimplets within 7 days may not be able to take the sudden ammonia spike when it’s release. However, because there are beneficial bacteria in the tank constantly, the spike doesn’t appear to affect the adults.
For me i’ll prefer to use a safer method whenever possible is to transfer the shrimp to another tank and so the shrimps location will shift over time as i kinda play musical chairs with all the tanks however usually only resetting one tank at a time depending on availability of tanks.
Summary
There are numerous benefit of tank reset and shouldn’t be put off to a “Later Time”. Instead of procrastinating about tank reset, i think it’s better to consider stream-lining the process of tank setup so that tank reset doesn’t become a burden to you. In the past i tried many ways including UGF and box UGF thinking that reset would be much easier, however, at the moment nothing appears to beat the thin layer of soil in terms of speed and ease of resetting because long term it all adds up.
Hope this post have been beneficial to you.
Meeting your needs
Everyone has 24 hours, nobody have more of it or less of it. It is how we fully utilize and the willingness to allocate time for things that matter. This is because i believe that let us strive to improve continuously; for we cannot remain stationary. One either progresses or retrogrades.
This post helps to conceptualize the Why of things and streamline the processes to gain back time.
We all have busy life with work and family that we need to take care. We have jobs that need us to be there majority of time and we still need to spend time with our love ones. However, without giving up any of those we can stream line our processes and optimize our setup so we can spend more time with things that matter. At least for me, i would want to spend as much time as i can with my family, so this the “Why” i invest in the initial setup. Time and Resources during the setup.
There are two things that takes up majority of time (excluding seeing them), water change and reset of tanks. There is no escaping that water change is necessary and resetting of tanks is necessary but both takes up a lot of time if you have a lot of tanks.
Hence, this is the why of things that i do what i do and still progress on the hobby, which in retrospect helps me a lot more in visualizing what i want to do with the next project and such.
I’m going to share with you how i do it in the following paragraph.
Setting up the infrastructure
During the course of my journey and as i learn how to better optimize the infrastructure such as the tank setup and location, it becomes important to me. For example there are 2 main important things which i really look for :
- water source
- drainage
- Sink
Though very basic for shrimp keeping, i needed these two important things due to ease of water change. Water change is a large part for shrimp breeding. This small yet essential change to the infrastructure helps reduce time taken to drain water and fill it up.
There are a few ways to do so, either we drill a hole in the tank and make it an outlet for draining or we can use gravity with another hose to drain the water.
since filling the water up is fairly quick, i have opt for using gravity to drain the water in the tank.
Lastly is a small sink which allows me to wash and disinfect tools, unpacking of shrimps and so on. A sink provides a lot of flexibility when dealing with the aquatic hobby. With the opportunity to re-do everything again, what i did was to have a sink, a drainage and water outlet all in one place. This helps contain and reduce movements in and out of the facility.
Drainage and Inflow
Draining using gravity requires some calibration to the hose use to fill the tank up. It uses the same inlet into the tank but with an additional valve to drain the water out. 
This method if done correctly will help save a lot of time in draining the water. However, this doesn’t remove the need to siphon or clean your soil once in 3-6 months.
From the picture below the first 4 tap is for the inflow of water into the 4 tanks after draining and the last tap (5th) is the drainage valve. What this does is if the “main water in tap” is shut off and the “water out tap” is turn on, than the draining process will begin. If multiple tiers are connected, it is important to note the draining hoses connected at the next tier below for draining need to be lower than the draining height. A safe method is the connecting valve on the next tier be at the level of the bottom of the tank.
Alternatively, individual tiers can have it’s own drainage outlet but all connected to the main drainage outlet.
Thin layer of soil but more frequent reset
The reason why i use thin layer of soil is because it is easier to manage from a 3-6 months siphoning (cleaning of soil) perspective and it is also faster to reset the tanks when needed.
These two elements help reduce time spent in resetting and siphoning. With thinner layer of soil yes we do need to increase frequency of tank reset but resetting tanks frequently also helps boost the shrimp to breed.
During reset, what i do is to vacuum out the soil and water together and i can now reset tanks very quickly. The entire end to end process takes 15 mins per tank but does not exponentially increase with more tanks because now i can reset 4 tanks in an hour. In the past when i have UGF setup and box UGF i couldn’t reset as fast.
Now it is a breeze.
Increasing grazing material
Daily feed is still a routine for me and it is something i do so the inspection of the shrimps are done that way, looking at how the shrimps are doing. While i feed once or twice daily, i have opt for using lubao as a grazing material. This helps and allow me to go on vacation or days without feeding if needed. Increasing the grazing material helps with extending the time between feeds.
Enjoying Shrimp Breeding
Personally i would like to achieve minimizing time spent in the various necessary task essential to shrimp breeding, and with the above steps taken i was able to truly enjoy the shrimp hobby as it doesn’t steal away a lot of time yet able to achieve good results in breeding. Over time i was able to keep improving through the years and consistently do what i believe is great work.
Life is short to live in regrets because tomorrow is no guarantee. We can’t become fit if we go to the gym once a year, it is through small steps, small changes, small adjustment and doing it consistently that will eventually adds up to the goal.
i’ll close with this quote which i like from Roy Bennett “Maturity is when you stop complaining and making excuses in your life; you realize that everything that happens in life is a result of a previous choice you’ve made and start making new choices to change your life.
Hope this post is beneficial for those who are rethinking their setup and or going towards a different phase of shrimp breeding.
