Jared Andrews

It's been a couple weeks since I noticed the number of berried shrimp go down. I have been waiting to see some babies before I change the filter as I didn't want to cause any egg drops with the chaos of moving things around in the tank.

I finally saw some babies this week, they are still so small. If you look at the tail of the big shrimp you can see one:

Paying more attention to the shrimp, I have noticed new berried shrimp and I have even noticed size disparities which indicate that there have been other generations of shrimp born that I just didn't notice.

Compared to the first wave of shrimp babies, the tank now has much more plant volume and therefore many more hiding places.

Given that, I have decided over the next couple days I will be doing the following:

• Replacing the left side sponge filter with a narrower filter. My motivation for this is making the more the open side of the tank a little more open and hopefully easier to clean.
• Add some additional sand to the left side. The substrate bags beneath the sand layer on this side of the tank have been continuously exposed which I don't really like.
• Add a 3D printed shrimp hide or two under the sand.
• Add some moss to the spider wood in the middle of the tank.

I will be doing these things over the following days and repeatedly testing to make sure the cycle doesn't crash. I have had the new filter "marinating" in the water for a couple of weeks, so I am not super worried. Additionally, there is a second smaller sponge filter on the right side of the tank, which arguably has enough capacity to be the only filter in this tank.