Nanotank Setup Advice

You’ve seen some nice videos on YouTube of small tanks with fresh water shrimp. Here are some tips on setting a shrimp tank up for yourself.

Background

Anything smaller than 15 gallons is considered a nanotank. If you search for “nanotank stocking”, you’ll find many lists of fish and shrimp that will do well in that small of a tank.

I recommend going with a planted or Walstad-style tank. Waste in the tank will break down into nitrite, nitrate and ammonia, and those are bad for fish and shrimp. They are also fertilizer, so plants will help keep the levels down to safe (sometimes not even detectable) levels.

Terms

  • Substrate - The dirt and sand in the bottom of the tank
  • Livestock - Anything alive in the tank that isn’t a plant

Requirements

Sources for these are in the Shopping List section below.

  • A five or ten gallon tank. If you have the space, I recommend a ten gallon. Because a larger tank has more water, the water parameters (more on that later) will change more slowly and help keep the water safe for your livestock.
  • A leveling mat if your tank didn’t come with one. Basically, this is a thin layer of neoprene that the tank sits on to protect the glass from stress - once your tank is full, even something as small as a little bit of sand underneath it can cause stress points that can eventually make the glass crack or even shatter. Five gallons of water can make a huge mess, so either invest in a mat, or cut your own from a used yoga mat or roll of neoprene. Make sure it’s a quarter to half inch (5 to 10 mm) thick.
  • A bag of topsoil or potting soil. Organic is best. Try to find something without extra fertilizer in it.
  • A bag of sand. You can buy it at an aquarium store and pay $20 for five pounds, or you can buy playground sand at a garden center and pay about $10 for 50 pounds. Some people use pool filter sand, but I prefer playground sand because it’s meant for children to play in and theoretically won’t have any noxious chemicals in it.
  • Dechlorinator. Unless you have well water, the water from your tap will have chlorine and/or chloramine in it to keep bacteria from growing in it, and it will kill the good bacteria in your tank and also harm your fish, shrimp or snails. I use API AquaSafe because it was in stock at my local pet store, but there are a lot of other options out there. You’re only going to be using small (like fractions of a cap full per gallon of water) so you don’t need to buy a huge bottle.
  • A water test kit. This is optional - most local pet stores will test your water for free if you bring in a jar, but it’s less hassle to do it at home and save yourself a trip
  • Rocks and/or driftwood to put in the tank. It’ll make the tank look more interesting, give the livestock places to hide that will make them feel more secure and it provides a lot of surface area for good bacteria and biofilm to form. I don’t like the decorations at pet stores, but it’s your tank, add whatever you want. I recommend adding at least some lava rocks since they’re porous and provide a lot of surface area for biofilm to grow.
  • A new five gallon bucket. You want one that’s never had anything but water in it - fish and shrimp are incredibly sensitive to some chemicals and you don’t want to accidentally poison them.
  • Plants. The more, the better. I recommend a mix of floating plants and rooted plants. There’s a section below with some species suggestions that are easy to keep alive.
  • A bacteria starter. I use Seachem Stability but there are a ton of other alternatives

Do not buy any fish or shrimp yet. The tank will take three to six weeks to get a nitrogen cycle going and biofilm growing in the tank. Adding livestock to a tank too early is likely to kill them, and it’s so common that there’s a name for it - New Tank Syndrome.

Tank Setup

Before you set up the tank, decide where you’re going to want to put it

Water weighs about 8.3 pounds (3.8 kg) a gallon, so a five gallon tank will weigh 40 pounds just for the water - the tank, substrate and plants will add at least another 15-20%. You will definitely not want to have to move a 50 pound fragile glass tank later.

Do a water leak test before you set the tank up

Find a spot where water can’t hurt anything, and put the leveling pad on top of some paper towels. You want the paper towels to extend out from under the pad all around the bottom edges of the tank so you can see if there are any slow leaks. Put the tank on the pad and fill it with water. I like to wait at least 24 hours so I can find any slow leaks. Do not try this in a bathtub - the bottom of the tub is sloped to help with drainage and that will stress the bottom of your aquarium and potentially cause future leaks.

Finally, start setting up the tank

Ok, now we’re ready to get started. Any time these directions call for water, I mean dechlorinated water. If you soak the substrate with chlorinated water, it will make it harder for the beneficial bacteria you need to establish a colony.

  1. Sift some of the topsoil/potting soil through a screen to get the big chunks out. If you don’t have a screen you can pick it out with your fingers but that’ll take a little longer. You should put about half an inch to an inch (12.5mm to 25mm) of this in the bottom of your tank as the first layer of your substrate.
  2. Gently wet it down with water until there the water is about 1/2 inch (12.5 mm) deep. You don’t want to disturb it too much, but you also want to get as many air pockets out of it as you can. I just press it with my hands, but I’ve seen videos where people poke it with toothpicks or bamboo skewers.
  3. Wash your sand. Before you add it to your tank, put it in a bucket and rinse it with a hose until the water runs clear or your tank will be cloudy for several days to a week.
  4. Put a layer of sand on top of the potting soil until it’s twice as thick as the dirt layer.
  5. Slowly add about two inches (5cm) of water into the tank. To keep it from scattering sand everywhere, I put a plastic bag into the tank and then pour the water slowly onto the bag. This will make adding your plants easier.
  6. If you’re using a sponge filter, put it in the tank now so you can place the rocks & driftwood around it.
  7. If you’re adding rocks, driftwood or other decorations, now’s the time. If your driftwood isn’t waterlogged enough, it’ll float. You can use superglue to glue it to some of your rocks to hold it down. The easiest way to do this is to put some glue on the rock where the wood is going to rest, add a very small wad of tissue, then more superglue, and then hold the driftwood against the glue-soaked tissue until it sets. Make sure to leave enough room around the sponge filter that you can pull it out to clean it every month or two without disturbing the hardscape you just spent time arranging to look nice. Most of the rooted plants you buy will come in big clumps - separate them gently into smaller clumps before planting so you can cover more of the substrate. They’ll spread as they grow, so more small clumps will cover the bottom faster than a few larger clumps, even if it’s the same amount of plants.
  8. Plant all your rooted plants. I found it easier to use a set of aquarium tongs to wiggle the roots into the sand, but if bare fingers work better for you, go for it. Again, leave a little room around the filter.
  9. Slowly fill the tank the rest of the way up. This is where the plastic bag trick really helps - it will keep the water from stirring up the sand layer of your substrate and knocking your plants loose. Most floating plants ironically don’t do well if the tops of their leaves are wet, so wait for the tank to fill before adding them.
  10. Follow the instructions on your bacteria starter to kick start the beneficial bacteria colony in your tank. The bacteria colony and your plants will take care of cleaning nitrates, nitrites and ammonia produced by animal waste, decomposing plants and excess food that will harm your shrimp and fish.

Now you wait for the tank to establish a nitrogen cycle and season. It can take anywhere from three to eight weeks if you don’t use a bacteria starter, or two to three if you use the starter.

Shopping list

Everything here will definitely be fine for a 5 or 10 gallon tank. You may need to upsize the pump and filters if you have a bigger tank. They will have a gallon range in their descriptions.

Hardware

  • A 5 or 10 gallon tank. If you’re in the US, Petco frequently has 50% off sales. I recommend buying from a pet store over Amazon because you can inspect the tank for chips or cracks.
  • An air pump - I bought a Pawfly, air pump and it’s good for up to a 20 gallon tank. It’s very quiet. If they’re in stock, get the bundle that includes a sponge filter, it’ll also include enough air line and assorted valves to get you set up.
  • If the pump + filter bundle isn’t in stock, I recommend a sponge filter so that the baby shrimp don’t get pulled into the filter and killed. I got an Aquaneat filter but anything sized for a 10 gallon tank will do.
  • Ohtomber Aquascape Tools Aquarium Kit. This comes with aquarium scissors, two different kinds of tongs for handling food or replanting plants and a tool for tidying up the substrate
  • Seachem Stability - Use this to kick-start your tank’s beneficial bacteria colony. There are many other options, but that’s what was in stock at my local pet store and it worked for me.
  • Tetra Aquasafe Plus - You can get the smallest size bottle, 1/2 tsp will treat 5 gallons of water. Six months of water treatment only used a quarter bottle.
  • A turkey baster. They’re great for spot cleaning the tank. You can buy something designed for aquariums and pay twice the price if you want.

Food

You can feed your shrimp just about anything that’s meant for bottom dwellers, or even just flake fish food. They can get by on just the algae and biofilm in your tank after it’s had a few months to develop, they will only be getting by. Your colony will breed faster and stay healthier if you supplement their diet with other food.

I really like GlasGarten Bacter AE - a little goes a very long way - for my five gallon tank, I add about a third of the scoop (roughly the size of a grain or two of rice) that comes with the food once or twice a week. It helps encourage biofilm growth and will really help baby shrimplets to survive. The powder can be a little hard to dissolve, so I fill an old prescription bottle half way with tank water, add the powder, than shake it hard until it looks milky white. Then I can pour the solution across the top of the tank and let it disperse. The first week or so after birth, baby shrimp don’t move very far, so if there isn’t food right there for them they can starve. Sometimes I’ll use the baster to squirt some of the bacter solution directly into the java moss clumps in my tank since that’s where I usually see babies first.

My colony also likes Fluval Bug Bites.

Shrimp also enjoy blanched vegetables - boil a piece of cucumber, spinach leaves, kale or thinly sliced carrot for two or three minutes until it’s soft, then stick it in the tank. I put them on bamboo skewers to make it easier to pull out the scraps later - I don’t leave them in the tank more than 24 hours to keep them from starting to rot.

I’ve also fed them hard boiled egg yolk, roughly a quarter yolk for every 30 shrimp, and my shrimp really like it. The females need protein to make eggs, so it encourages them to breed.

Plants

Here are some species of plants that I’ve found do well in my tank with a minimal amount of effort on my part. If you want some more suggestions, search for “low-tech” friendly plants - those tend not to need CO2 supplementation or regular doses of fertilizer and are less hassle long term.

Floating Plants

The only thing you need to do for these plants is make sure there isn’t a lot of surface agitation in the tank. They don’t do well if the tops of the leaves get wet for long periods of time.

  • Red Root Floaters. I like these because they grow pretty quickly and the shrimp like to hang out in their hanging roots and eat the biofilm growing there. The only maintenance I have to do is pull a couple of fistfuls out of the tank every week or two to keep them from over-shading the rooted plants in the bottom of the tank.
  • Salvinia Minima. These are similar to RRFs and have the same requirements. I like having both to make the surface of the tank look a little more interesting.
  • Duckweed. You’ll hear a lot of opinions about duckweed. Some people hate it and call it the glitter of the aquarium hobby. It’s ridiculously hard to get it out of a tank once it has infested established itself, but it grows fast and sucks a lot of waste out of the water.

Other Plants

  • Java Ferns: These are epiphytes. The TL;DR is that if you bury the rhizome (the root system), they will die. You can either tie the rhizome to rocks/driftwood/decorations with thread (which I found to be a pain in the ass) or just superglue it. If you do glue it, use the smallest possible drops - they tolerate the glue very well, but if you cover the whole rhizome it will kill the plant. If you glue them to a small rock it makes it easy to move them around the tank if you want to later.
  • Java Moss: This grows very easily and is a great hiding place for baby shrimp and fish. Mother shrimp feel more secure and breed more quickly when there are good hiding places for babies, so I recommend adding java moss, or really any kind of moss to your tank.
  • Dwarf Sagitarrius: This is a grass-like plant that will spread out to cover the bottom of your tank by sending out runner roots. It grows relatively quickly, I started with one small plant and two months later it had formed a nice carpet. The only maintenance I do on it is to cut the leaves short every few weeks since I prefer the way that looks. I leave it tall enough for the shrimp to hide in it if they want, but short enough the the middle depth of the tank is clear so I can see the shrimp moving around.
  • Pogostemon: There are many varieties of this stem plant and will grow moderately quickly. When it gets longer than you want, you can cut it and replant the trimmings in the tank to help it spread faster.
  • Pearlweed: This doesn’t require a lot of care and grows quickly. Some would say too quickly - if you don’t trim it back regularly (like at most every two weeks) it will take over the tank to the point that all you can see is a thick clump of pearlweed. It’s great for outcompeting algae and providing hiding places for your shrimp, but will easily grow to a point where you can barely see any of the shrimp.

Livestock

Shrimp

Neocaridina Davidii (aka Cherry Shrimp)

I like neocaridina shrimp because they come in a large variety of color morphs and are hardy enough that they thrive in a wide range of water conditions. You can have multiple colors (a skittles tank) but the different color morphs will interbreed, and after a few generations you will end up with mostly wild-type neos and not the vivid colors of the original morphs.

The females are larger (up to 1.25 inches) and usually more colorful than the males. Ideally you will start your colony with 10-20 shrimp in a 1 male to 3 female ratio.

Amano Shrimp

These are also hardy. They grow larger than neocaridinas (up to two inches). They are great algae eaters and are very hardy. They may lay eggs and hatch larvae, but unlike neocaridinas, the larvae will not survive for more than a couple of days in fresh water.

Fish

As far as fish are concerned, anything smaller than their mouth is food. And if they can tear it apart easily, things larger than their mouth are food too. If you decide to add fish to your shrimp tank, I recommend that you wait until the colony is well established with at least 50 adults.

If you’re planning to add fish to the tank, I recommend you add some small piles of lava rocks to the tank to give the shrimp more places to hide than just in the plants. And feed the fish regularly. Your choice is to feed them fish food, or feed them your shrimp and shrimplets.

Chili Rasboras

These are small colorful fish with small mouths. They may eat a few of your baby shrimp when they are very small, but will leave larger juveniles and the adults alone. These are what I’m planning to add to my tank next. They’re social fish and will be nervous if you have less than five or six in the tank.

Corydoras

Cories will only eat dead or very sick shrimp. They’re social fish, so if you get them, get at least three of them.

Bettas

Bettas can be aggressive hunters and not only will they go after and decimate your baby shrimp, they have been known to kill adult shrimp as well. Avoid, especially if the tank is smaller than ten gallons.

Goldfish

I only mention them because of how bad an idea it is to add them to a nanotank. Contrary to popular belief, they grow very large, produce a lot of waste (more maintenance for you) and if that wasn’t bad enough, will happily eat your shrimp.

Guppies

Not only will they go after your baby shrimp, they breed ridiculously fast. If you do decide to add guppies, I recommend you only add males.

Maintenance

The joy of a planted tank is that you don’t actually have to do all that much maintenance. If you have enough plants, you won’t need to do water changes very often if at all.

Water

When water evaporates from your tank (and it will, surprisingly quickly, even with a lid), it leaves any dissolved solids or minerals behind. If you top off with conditioned tap water, the concentration of dissolved solids will slowly creep up, and that could lead to a colony crash when the levels finally build up high enough that the shrimp can no longer tolerate them.

You could do regular water changes, but that’s a fair bit of work, and then you’re going to have big swings in the water parameters after water changes, and shrimp like stability. The easiest solution is to just top off with distilled or reverse osmosis water that is at roughly the same temperature as your tank. I keep the gallon jugs of distilled water in the same room as the tank so it is roughly the same temperature as the tank. When I need to top off, I slowly add a cup or so to the tank every 30-40 minutes until it’s back at the proper water level.

You really don’t need to do water changes unless you test the water and see a nitrate, nitrite or ammonia spike.

Plants

Floating Plants

The floating plants are easy. I set up a small plastic bin, and fill it half way with tank water. Then as I pull each clump of plants out, I swirl them through the water in the bin so any shrimplets clinging to their roots let go, and then put them in the trash.

Stemmed Plants

I trim the stemmed plants. When I’m first setting up a tank, I’ll replant the cutting in a sparsely planted area of the tank, but if the tank doesn’t have bare patches any more and I’m going to toss them or give htem away, I’ll give them a swirl in the plastic bin just like with floaters to shake loose any shrimplets.

Finally

After I’ve pulled everything out that I’m going to, I pour the water back into the tank - more often than not this saves two or three shrimplets from going in the garbage.