About four or five weeks ago I dragged out my old drumside "goldfish" bowl and set it up on the windowsill.

I save small amounts of leftover sand and gravel so I used a sample of CaribSea Sunset Gold sand (about a half-pound) and over that some sifted gravel from the play sand in my 75 gallon.

Some houseplant stems in an old vase were used to anchor the sand. I just trimmed the roots up and pushed them in. Then, I added two clumps of Java moss.

After this settled down, I added a brown ramshorn snail (Planorba sp.) and a flake of food. In the middle of April I added a Red Cherry Shrimp, Neocaridina heteropoda.

Nice shrimp! Everything looks very healthy and vibrant! So tell us what you doing for water changes on the bowl or are you running a filter?

Very nice Deb. The small things are true test to aquatic skills. I have never been successful keeping inverts but they are pretty.

Thanks! The Mar/Apr issue of Amazonas says they prefer to search through the plants for live micro-food than to eat prepared food, so I'm trying that.

mpowers wrote:

So tell us what you doing for water changes on the bowl or are you running a filter?

There is no mechanical filter on the bowl. The PLANTS are the filter. Every morning I stir the water to get the water circulating around the plants and add about a bathroom Dixie cup of water to account for the previous day's evaporation.

love the shrimp bowl! i miss my shrimpies. i keep thinking about getting some again and i've been wanting to set up a triops bowl. it's the closest i'll get to keeping horseshoe crabs, i think.

So no soil, just sand right? Any fertz or just letting the shrimp and the minor food left over to feed everything? Since I'm full of questions, the sunlight is indirect?

In the above pic you can see a shrimp baby just to the left of the forward snail. Look for the eye stalks. This was one of many babies born in the bowl after the two adults were introduced.

The timeline indicates that the female was carrying eggs before she was added to this bowl. The eggs were laid, hatched, and the first bunch of babies was born!

They are extremely hard for me to photograph with my current equipment.
Here is one of the better shots of an older baby:

Neocaridina heteropoda juvenile.

He's perched on the extended roots of the lucky bamboo stem. As the babies in this batch grow bigger, another batch has been laid and hatched.

The snails are still looking good and growing.
Here is one of them with his foot fully extended.

Planorba species, poda extension.

The bowl is looking great! At what point will you purge excess shrimp?

That is a good question and one I've been thinking about since the beginning. Two to four adult shrimps at full size are fine in a bowl of these dimensions. Fifteen large juveniles would be fine - that is, several between the sizes of 8mm to 11mm. It's easier to tell you in mm's because I can be more precise.

Right now I have about fifteen to twenty juvies of 8-11mm and many several more about 5-6mm. I'm waiting for the larger ones to get just a bit bigger and then I will move them. There are two planted tanks where they could go and not be eaten. But I think they should be a bit bigger before I move them, > 15mm is my goal. Thanks for asking!

Oh wow, what a neat idea.

Well, a few days ago I moved about five of the medium size shrimps, shown in the photo below, to the 10 gallon Hara jerdoni tank (Asian mini-moth in my signature.) The ten gallon has black sand and a lot of plants. A large cherry red shrimp already lives there so these five new ones should fit right in.

Here are a few of the shrimps that moved:

Juvenile N. heteropoda eating an expired arrow plant leaf.

This is interesting - the shrimps in the bowl were mostly clear in color but were showing hints of red. After only a few hours in the 10 gallon tank, they had turned fully red. I assume this is the effect of environment.

Probably the black sand, I know a lot of cichlids color up more over a dark substrate. As always, great looking skrimp!

Update:

All of the shrimp have been moved to this tank:


Read the thread here:
http://cvas.forumotion.com/t123p30-setting-up-for-hara-jerdoni#8726