Nutritive Soil or Inert Substrate?

[Hwynette]

Please help; I'm tired of trying to figure it out. Have read many of the threads (if not most) debating soil vs inert. I have an 8 gal tank (Innovative Marine) with decent lights (6 x 1 watt daylight LEDs), sponge filter, heater, and C02 (02 not yet in use).

I'd like to have shrimp and some small plants (moss, crypts, and maybe HC?) along with the 2 pieces of driftwood. I attempted to use some black generic shrimp substrate and contrasting white sand, but the black is "littering" on to the white sand. Wondering if I should go to all black substrate or get the ADA system? These are not high intensity lights; medium I've been told? Is the ADA system overkill for this size aquarium? I just want sufficient nutrients for the plants so they do well without me having to dose as there seem to be problems with ferts and shrimp? How do you do water changes without disturbing the substrate when you have two different types/colors? It is hard to aquascape in such a small tank. The tank is still cycling and it only has driftwood with moss (no shrimp yet) so I'm free to make changes at this point without problems. Please, any/all advice welcome!

[madness]

The type of shrimp that you plan to keep will make a big difference.

If you are only keeping neocaridina shrimp then you have a lot less to worry about and you can probably go with light fertilization and light CO2 and be OK. Neocaridina thrive in a really wide range of tank settings and basically as long as you don't do anything extreme (like use way too much C02, dump a ton of food in the tank or use way too much fertilizer) they should adapt and do well.

The mosses and most of the plants that you will attach to the driftwood don't even require CO2 or special ferts. If you try to do a carpet plant like HC you will probably need the CO2, ferts, etc. Both the crypts and the HC would benefit from a nutritive substrate but you can get around that if you supplement ferts correctly, maybe toss in a few root tabs for the crypts.

If you are going to keep caridina cantonensis shrimp (Crystal Red/Black Shrimp, Taiwan Bee shrimp, tiger shrimp, etc.) then you probably want to focus more on the shrimp health/tank parameters. In that case I WOULD recommend ADA soil.

According to the PAR charts that Innovative Marine provides with the 8 watt clamp on LED (the one that you have I think) I think that you will have plenty of light to grow anything that you want in the center of the tank and still enough further out from the center for pretty much any application.

There are so many different options and factors involved that it is hard to give you a simple and concrete answer but here is my advice in summary:

If you can pony up for some ADA Aqua Soil New Amazonia multi-type (you can choose another type but what I just listed is a good general purpose type that a lot of us use) I would just bite the bullet and do so. You already invested in a pretty nice tank. The ADA soil will work good for any plant that you might want and will be a good choice for any shrimp that you might want to keep. If you go low tech (little ferts, no CO2) it will work great as a soil. If you go high tech (CO2 and a lot of ferts) it will work good as a soil. If you go with more sensitive shrimp eventually you can just switch to using RO water and the soil will work great for those as well.

[madness]

With neocaridina shrimp (Red Cherry Shrimp, yellow neos, pumpkin/orange neos, rilis, snowballs, blue pearls, etc.) you can use just about any non-alkaline substrate (I wouldn't recommend crushed coral or African cichlid style substrates for these shrimp) that you can think of - whether they are inert or contain nutrients.

I have red cherry shrimp in tanks with eco-complete, with regular aquarium gravel, with dirt soil underneath sand and with black sand only. The neos don't seem to mind or care so with neos you just choose whatever soil is best for your plants (or is cheapest or that you think looks the coolest).

It is only with more delicate/sensitive shrimp that you really have to start planning ahead and making trade-offs in order to maintain shrimp health and breeding. There are people keeping high grade CRS and nice tiger shrimp varieties in all sorts of tank conditions but those are usually people who have a lot of experience and know how to balance the trade-offs and know how to set up a tank (or people who didn't know any better and just got lucky).

So when you see people stating things as absolutes when it comes to keeping CRS and tiger shrimp you have to think of it more as "this is a safe/reliable set-up" rather than as "this is the only way to possibly keep them."

Due to the cost of many of these shrimp people don't tend to like to mess around with experimenting with tank set-ups nor do they want to offer advice to someone that might result in them having shrimp deaths.

[Hwynette]

Madness, thanks so much for the advice; great input. As a new shrimp keeper, right now I only have 2 RCS, 1 Amano, 1 Sakura yellow, and 1 'banded' (LFS name). They are currently in an 8 gal tank with 1 African Dwarf Frog, 1 Zebra Nerite snail, and 3 male Guppies. I really enjoy watching them and thus got this 8 gal to move them in to. My thinking was that I'd like to set up the 8gal within the stricter water parameters of say CRS so that in the future if I wanted to go in that direction the water params would already be stable. I will get the ADA Aqua Soil New Amazonia; not sure where to get as ADG has been out of stock for quite a while? A question too on the ferts: I've read many ferts are bad for shrimp since they contain copper (I have Flourish, Excel, & Iron that I use in my fish tank) but I don't remember seeing any references from folks in the States about what the best ones are for shrimp?