Sitting on my desk, is my third aquarium.  It’s a 5 gallon and it’s empty, save for being freshly planted.  I still need to cycle it, which can take a good month if not two.  But once it’s done I will have blue velvet shrimp in there.  I am, SUPER excited about this.  I’ve been wanting a shrimp tank for a while.

I tried to house them in my 20, but things went downhill when I got pneumonia 6 months back.  My tank was overstocked, so when I didn’t keep up on water changes, the chemistry went bad and the shrimp, which are super sensitive to these things, died.

But I learned my lesson.  Water changes every Friday or Saturday no matter what.  And it’ll all be ok.

Anyway, I’m piecing together the tank bit by bit.  I just got the plants in.  It’s scaped to be sort of  a full wild jungle feel.  They are in orderly rows, actually, but as they grow it’ll be more out of control.

There are five different kinds of plants in there.  Don’t ask me to name them.  I’m not good at plant identification.

I plan to kick-start the cycle process by adding ammonium.  I have it on order and it should be here sometime next week.  Then it’s a patient game of water changes and daily chemistry checks.  I’m not looking forward to it.  But if I don’t do it, the shrimp will just die.  So, I have little choice.

Once done I’ll buy 12 blue velvet shrimp and call them The Collective.  Because why not.

Meanwhile life in the 10 and 20 goes on.

The 10 gallon is now home to a nerite snail as well as my betta.  There were two snails but one of them died.  I’m not entirely sure what happened.  I know my betta was really upset about the invasion of the snails, but I’m fairly certain betta can’t hurt these guys.  I also upgraded the filer to a sponge filter, which is super exciting for my, and the betta both.  The flow of a sponge filter is much more gentle and betta prefer that.

The 20 gallon was out of control with its sunburst platy population, so I took them all back to the store.  Well, all but one.  I somehow ended up with an albino one, so I kept him.  That done, I was only at 68% stocked so I had the option of adding more fish.  I bought a pair of blue gourami.  Now they are male and female, but they are egg layers and the fish, snails, and filter will eat all the eggs, so I don’t have to worry about out of control babies.  I named them Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy.