What do you do with shrimp breeding in small tanks?

I was wondering how to take care of very small shrimp tanks eg 2. 5 gal filled with RCS, as don't they breed a lot, and soon that tank would be overstocked. What do people do? Thanks

 

Most the time when people find themselves with too many shrimp in a small tank, they cull (remove lesser grade colors) and move the culls to other tanks, sell them, or use them as live foods. It seems that cherry shrimp are in high demand these days so selling them to a good pet store should be a piece of cake.

Or, you can add a pea puffer or a betta and they can feast on the over populated shrimp. They should be able to keep a colony population in check.

 

Is there any other methods apart from selling and killing to keep the population in check?

 

I'd sell them. Also, I definitely wouldn't add a pea puffer unless you want them all dead, and the same goes for the betta (but that's more personality dependent).

 

Is there any other methods apart from selling and killing to keep the population in check?

killing, selling or moving to another tank are your only options to keep the population under control

 

I mean, you could always master the art of magic and send them to a different dimension...
Selling is probably your best bet IMO, that or culling, as most, if not all, fish/other that would be introduced to control the population may end up killing all of them.

 

They're supposed to basically only generally get to a population based on space and food availability. That said, you can have a lot in a small tank

 

Oh, I totally forgot to mention the actual population you can probably get away with. When I was doing research on cherries (I literally just did that for three months before getting mine ), I came across one person, I think it was the planted tank forum, who had upgraded their heavily planted CRS tank to a 20 and ended up moving over 500 shrimp. Depending on the amount of plants you have and how frequently you do water changes ( I recommend 10% or so a week), you can have quite a good bit of them.

 

Oh, I totally forgot to mention the actual population you can probably get away with. When I was doing research on cherries (I literally just did that for three months before getting mine ), I came across one person, I think it was the planted tank forum, who had upgraded their heavily planted CRS tank to a 20 and ended up moving over 500 shrimp. Depending on the amount of plants you have and how frequently you do water changes ( I recommend 10% or so a week), you can have quite a good bit of them.

I think a lot of people don't realize just how many you can safely have, lol.

 

I think a lot of people don't realize just how many you can safely have, lol.

I definitely agree, I'm so glad you remebered to point that out. I think it's because I kept seeing statistics of keeping only 5-15 per gallon, but I've seen a handful of people keeping closer to 80-100 per gallon. Plus shrimplets don't count for much at all when considering bioload

 

Well, I definitely don't think I'm at 100/gallon (no way I'm counting), but I'm definitely not at 5, lol.

 

Lol my population crashed big time, so I have like 1 a gallon, R.I.P. little shrimpies... hydra is the worst

 

Have you ever seen shrimp poop? Probably not the most obviously thing in your aquarium, because it’s tiny. They have extremely tiny bioloads that don’t register highly in the stocking. You can overpopulate most tanks with shrimp very easily, as long as you watch the water.

Culling is a main part of controlling it, I personally like moving them to different tanks, but killing won’t be a problem.

 

Have you ever seen shrimp poop? Probably not the most obviously thing in your aquarium, because it’s tiny. They have extremely tiny bioloads that don’t register highly in the stocking. You can overpopulate most tanks with shrimp very easily, as long as you watch the water.

Culling is a main part of controlling it, I personally like moving them to different tanks, but killing won’t be a problem.

Possibly gross, but it looks really interesting in my light blues, especially if they've eaten something light colored, because you can see it in their whole body. They look like they have a glowing stripe, lol.

 

Possibly gross, but it looks really interesting in my light blues, especially if they've eaten something light colored, because you can see it in their whole body. They look like they have a glowing stripe, lol.

Yes, that’s super freakish!