10 Gallon Tank Adding shrimp to a 10 gallon guppy/cory tank

[newtoaquariums123]

Hi everyone,


I'm looking for a bit of advice about my 10 gallon guppy/cory tank. I've had the tank for about 8 weeks and it is fully cycled.


Right now I have the tank set up as a bachelor pad with:
-5 male guppies (2 dwarf pandas, 2 regular size and 1 endler)
-2 bronze corydoras
-3 black Nerite snails


Everyone is healthy and stable, so I've been thinking about adding a third bronze cory and maybe 6-8 cherry shrimp.


My question is if this will be okay in terms of capacity, or will the shrimp cause me to be overstocked?

I understand that many of the shrimp fry will get eaten and am okay with it... I'm fascinated to try shrimp but don't want them to overrun the tank. I do have caves, rocks and assorted mosses set up so everyone will have places to hide.


Thank you in advance for any suggestions!

 

[Cue]

The shrimp won’t overstock it, but the bronze cories are too big for a 10 gallon tank. Ideally even the smallest cories would have a 20 gallon long, but you might be able to get away with a small species instead.

 

[Fishfur]

Shrimp have a very low bioload but they tend to do very poorly in tanks that are less than about six months old. They rely on a lot of biofilm and it takes that long for it to grow thick & plentiful.

You will have far better chances for success with them if you wait to add any shrimp.

And just fyi, chances are not good for those 3 nerites in a 10g of any age unless it’s been allowed or encouraged to become an algae plantation and possibly not even then.

They are about as close to being obligate algae eaters as can be because they are all wild caught. They just don’t recognize anything other than fresh growing green or brown algae as food.

A very few may eventually learn to eat blanched greens or kelp or other seaweeds but you cannot rely on any of them to learn this.

A distressingly large number of nerites die of starvation in tanks that simply don’t or can’t grow enough algae for their needs. You’d be surprised how much algae it takes to keep one nerite fed.

There is an option for feeding them, which is to grow green rocks for them. Just keep adding new green rocks to the tank in exchange for green rocks they have scraped clean of algae.

I use a bus bin with a layer of assorted rocks in it full of old tank water with an intense light as close to the water as possible to grow algae on rocks. You can grow them in the sun so long as it isn’t too cold too. Lights should be on 16-18 hours daily and one has to feed the algae - one way is to replace the bin water with changed out tank water after every water change - another is to use fertilizer for aquatic plants.

It’s just a regular switch of clean rocks from the tank for green ones from the bin.