Filtration, heating, hardscape, and maintenance.
Could your vampire crabs live in an ordinary aquarium, fully under water? No, a vampire crab (Geosesarma) can’t live under water full time. It’s a semi-terrestrial crab that lives mostly on land, breathes air through gills it keeps moist, and…
Your rabbit snail tank is still empty, and the substrate is the first thing that goes in. The best substrate for rabbit snails (Tylomelania sp.) is a fine, smooth, inert sand, with rock on top for them to graze. It’s…
Your rabbit snail tank has a haze on the front glass and a scatter of droppings across the sand. Most rabbit snail tanks need cleaning once a week, and a small water change plus a light pass over the sand…
Your tank is on the small side, so the plan is to fill it with wood and rock and give a rabbit snail more to explore. More hardscape won’t make up for a small tank: it adds surface to graze,…
Your rabbit snail (Tylomelania sp.) needs somewhere to stay for a few weeks, and the spare tank you’ve got is a cycled 2.5-gallon. It can hold the snail for two to four weeks, as long as the water matches what…
Should you pay for floor or for gallons when you pick a rabbit snail tank? Pay for floor: a rabbit snail (Tylomelania sp.) spends its whole life on the bottom and on the surfaces standing on it, so length times…
Which rock can you trust in a Sulawesi tank? Porous volcanic lava rock, because it’s inert, so it leaves your water where you set it, and its open pores hold the film the shrimp graze. Ask those two things of…
Your Sulawesi tank is filled, heated and running, and the shrimp you’ve picked out are waiting on one thing: you deciding it’s ready. Plan on at least 3-4 weeks with a powdered starter, and stock only when ammonia and nitrite…
You’ve got an empty tank, a pile of rock and a plan to bring a Sulawesi lake home. Build it as a warm, alkaline, rock and biofilm tank on remineralized RO water, hold it steady at 79-86°F (26-30°C) and pH…
How much oxygen do Sulawesi shrimp actually need? Keep the water close to air saturation for whatever temperature you run inside 79-86°F (26-30°C), and get there with constant surface movement instead of a stronger pump. That’s the water these shrimp…
You’ve got Sulawesi shrimp in the tank, or on the way, and you want them still grazing the rocks a year from now. Keeping them healthy is mostly a stability job, not a medicine job: hold 79-86°F (26-30°C), pH 7.5-8.5,…
Should you tear down a Sulawesi tank that keeps losing shrimp one at a time when the water tests clean? Only as a last step: once you’ve corrected everything the water lets you correct, the suspects left in a Sulawesi…
