carpet plants and shrimp
 

1st question-

i have a normal 10gal perfecto hood w/ flourecent light. is there any kind of carpet plant that i can use? i dont wanna do c02 or anythign special.

2nd question-

does adding shrimp to a tank for cleaning purposes affect the population count? would the shrimp bother my bottom dwellers liek the bumblebee gobies or my dwarf frog? what kind of shrimp would u recommend>?

Re: carpet plants and shrimp
 

If ya weight it down, javamoss will adhear to the gravel and make a decent covering plant, but most short plants that are used to cover the bottom need very high light, I'm not aware of any that can do well with low light.

Shrimp won't impact your filter to much, so 2-3 per gallon would be decent guide to go by.
The shrimp shouldn't mess with your bottom dwellers, but they will deffinatly mess with them.

Dwarf frogs natural food source are shrimp, they will quickly eat any that go in the tank.
I'm not sure about the gobies, don't they need brackish water though?

MP is correct. Most of the real carpet plants used are best used under high lights. If you put them in low light tanks, they start growing up instead of out.

Re: carpet plants and shrimp
 

yes they actually are brackish. i was told they can do well in a fw tank with a lil salt. i now realize that wasnt my best choice of fish for my tank but cant go back in time.


so 2-3 per gallon.. that would put me in the range of 20-30 shrimp in my 10 gal tank! i may be misunderstanding you.. what kind of shrimp would u suggest?

Cherry shrimp are great, nice and colorfull and do well on algae and will help cleaning up small bits of food the fish spit out. www.aquabid.com has people selling them for a decent price, even with shipping it tends to save alot of money over fish stores.

First ya need to get rid of the dwarf frogs though.

Most LFS's take fish back for in-store credit, and you can always take them to another store if the one you baught them from won't. Even if they won't give ya money, it's not fair for the fish to be housed in an enviroment outside of what it needs, please re-home the little guy. :)

Missed the question about stocking levels, sorry.
I've read of people doing 60 or so in a 10 gal when breeding for food, I'm sure they did very frequent water changes though. A safe bet would be 15-20 shrimp with no other fish, or 5-6 with fish, so with 6 shrimp you could do 8 or so neons or fish that don't grow over an inch.

You'll be needing to do bi-weekly or weekly water changes totaling around 50% with that level of stocking, and you'll also want decent filtration, something with a biowheel like a penguin rated for 20-30 gallons.
I personally use Emporer 280's on our 10 gallon tanks, it's a little over kill but my water is always crystal clear with no ammonia or nitrites.

Getting rid of the frog will allow you to get RCS (Red Cherry Shrimp). If you are in the US, join the PlantedTank.net forums and go the the Swap N Shop section. Many people keep shrimps in their planted tanks and are usually always offering shrimps for sale and normally sold for less than $1 per shrimp.

Make sure you buy RCS (Red Cherrry Shrimp) and NOT CRS (Crystal Red Shrimp). CRS are more expensive, at least $25 USD per shrimp for low grade, and are also more difficult to keep/breed, since they are particular about water parameters. CRS are very nice looking shrimp though, as you can see from the photo...

http://www.aquafever.com/phpBB-HK/fi...010072_143.jpg

Compared to RCS, which look like this...

http://www.petshrimp.com/images/redcherrygroup.jpg

For a list of shrimp varieties, go here...
http://www.petshrimp.com/shrimpspecies.html
http://www.freshwaterinverts.com/sub_shrimp.html

thanks guys for the info. i'll be checking into/researching java moss and some shrimp for the future!

I like the pix in your sig. The bumblebee looks sad and there should be a caption underneath the frog like "Tada!" or "Look Ma! One leg"

yes but i think it looks grumpy not sad!