Are there any benefits having shrimp in with borneo suckers?

[mattyd]

Hey all.

I have a fair few loach tanks with shrimp in them, and I often don't see the shrimplet babies because I assume that the fish eat them. However the shrimp keep breeding and there are always medium size ones that grow into adults. The exception being my 6ft tank with all my large clown loaches - no shrimp survives in that tank.

I once threw two very skiny and malnourished Kuhli loaches into a planted tank that had previously only had Endler livebearers and cherry shrimp. My shrimp population dropped almost immediately, and the two kuhlis grew into huge happy kuhlis within 2 months. They have now been moved into a larger tank with other kuhlis and apart from the captive shrimp population in their new tank they also get fed with fresh babies that I catch out of my shrimp only tanks.

But what I am wondering is should I put these same shrimp babies into the tanks of my gastromyzon and sewellia hillstream loaches?
Will the little borneo suckers actually ever bother chasing and eating the baby shrimps? I know that they'd be able to do almost nothing to the adult shrimp, but the baby shrimp are so incredibly tiny. If there is some benefit in having shrimp in the tank, then I'll load in a whole bunch of shrimplets.

Otherwise, I frequently add black worms into the tank to give the fish an option to catch and eat their own live food. The worms must be easily surviving because I always seem them hanging out of the sand on the calmer side of each rock. And when I move a rock there is always a bunch of worms underneath it.

Your thoughts people?

Matt

[Jim Powers]

My largest shrimp populations are in my hillstream tanks. I don't think they eat very many, if any, young shrimp.
The shrimp would probably eat any scattered sewellia eggs they could find, however.

[mattyd]

Hmmm, I would prefer to not lose any eggs if and when I ever get them.

So I might skip having shrimp in their tanks. Unless I get a few of the small shrimp babies and freeze them really quickly and feed the dead babies to the hillstream loaches.

Might just stick with high amounts of algae covered surfaces (which I am stuggling with at the moment), live blackworms and live microscopic bugs from my algae tubs outside (draing the green water through coffee filters and pouring the filtered contents into the tank).

[mattyd]

A bit of a post dig up, but I discovered my first sewellia baby in my tank last night. I think this might be a spotted species fry. Earlier on yesterday I noticed a dead sewellia lineolata (stripy one), and I removed it and decided to remove all the sand that was in the tank, and the millions of snails and the green beard algae that was growing in a big mat around some of the smaller pebbles. I sucked out all the sand, including the lonely cherry shrimp that was in the tank, and threw the snails into my various botia tanks. 1/3rd went into my kubotai tank, 1/3rd went into clown loach tank and 1/3rd went into the mixed botia tank. (I used a coarse weave net and sieved the sand for the snails. I had probably about 300-400 small snails all told, enough to fill a cup). I then started putting coarse river gravel into my sewellia tank, and placed larger pebbles above, and then finally my big algae covered rocks ontop. When I was finished I noticed a single lone baby seweilla fry scuttering around the new tank-scape.

Unfortunately, I didn't check any of the water that I threw out, or any of the snails that I threw into the botia tanks. I am now wondering if I might have inadvertantly discarded a bunch of fry. Hopefully, if I did, the fry manage to survive in those tanks where they might have been tossed with the snails, and who knows, maybe I'll start seeing some sewellia scooting around in the tanks where there should never be sewellia.

Suffice to say I will now be feeding carefully and doing water changes carefully. All with the intent on keeping the spawns regular and my fry numbers HIGH!

Matt

[Jim Powers]

Congratulations and good luck with the fry!