Forgive me… I said we’d stock these five new shrimp tanks after a week, and it turned into about three. Honestly, it’s not the worst thing because the tanks have had time to build up biofilm, which is basically shrimp heaven. The downside is we’ve got a bit of woolly algae and some thread/hair algae popping up from plants I moved over from older, balanced tanks. I’m not one of those people that panics at the first sign of algae though—string algae is the one I mind the least because you can literally twirl it out with tweezers and crack on. Before adding anything, I tested the tanks (TDS and pH mainly) and it was really interesting seeing how tannins from wood pulled pH down while serious stone pushed it up—especially in small volumes. I also owned up to a proper boo boo on the Caridina tank: I used the wrong shrimp mineral (KH/GH+) when Caridina generally want GH without the KH, so that one’s getting drained and redone with RO and the correct GH+ remineraliser. Then we hit the shop, grabbed around 20 of each shrimp type (green jellies, red rilis, orange rilis, plus a mixed cherry “skittle” tank), acclimated them the simple way for Neos, and got them raining into the cubes. Next up, I’m breaking down my absolute cherry shrimp breeding frenzy tank to move the colony into the final cube and refresh the scape properly.