A Peppermint Shrimp In My Overflow

[Jerad81]

A little over a month ago I bought two peppermint shrimp to hopefully help battle the aiptasia infestation I've been at war with for a few months now. After a couple days one of them just randomly disappeared and the second just randomly died after about a week. I'm still not sure what killed it as it looked and acted perfectly healthy and happy. Although I was getting a little mad at it because it wasn't even trying to help with my aiptasia problem lol.

 

About a week after the second one died I found the first one who dissapeared back in my overflow area. I have no idea how it got there or even how it has survived. I'm not feeding it or even trying to take care of it in any way yet it appears to be thriving back there fending for itself somehow.

 

Over the weekend I took all the hardware out of my tank to give them a good, and long overdue, cleaning. I noticed the shrimp came back into the display through one of the holes for a return pump tube. I got a little excited hoping it would stay but it started freaking out and was having a pretty serious stress attack over being there. After about 10 min it found it's way back into the overflow and stayed there. I assume it wasn't used to being surrounded by so much light all of a sudden that did it.

 

I guess my main question is how is this shrimp surviving back there? I have had issues with shrimp dieing for no apparent reason in the past as well. For some reason they never survive in my display yet the one in my overflow that  is not even getting fed is doing great. Why????

 

I feel like if I can figure out how this is possible it will hopefully help me with any future shrimp, or inverts in general, that I add to my tank later. I'm just really confused by this whole thing honestly and hoping someone here will be able to see what I'm obviously missing lol.

[DevilDuck]

Shrimp are near the bottom of the food chain, so they like to hide. Do you have caves and arches in your rock work for them to go?

[rough eye]

it's good to have overhangs that a shrimp can hang upside down from. my peppermint is now big enough and confident enough to come feed with the fishes, and today was cleaning my fingers as i had a pinch of pellets for my clown.

[Jerad81]

14 hours ago, DevilDuck said:

Shrimp are near the bottom of the food chain, so they like to hide. Do you have caves and arches in your rock work for them to go?

 

2 hours ago, rough eye said:

it's good to have overhangs that a shrimp can hang upside down from. my peppermint is now big enough and confident enough to come feed with the fishes, and today was cleaning my fingers as i had a pinch of pellets for my clown.

Thanks for the info! It sounds like I just don't have a good aqua scape to make shrimp happy. I do have one "cave"/overhang area as you can see in my pic below but that is where my circus goby hangs out. They are probably too afraid of him to hang out there as well. Oh well. Someday when I can upgrade to a bigger tank I will keep this in mind when I'm setting it up. Thanks again for the info!

 

[rough eye]

7 hours ago, Jerad81 said:

 

Thanks for the info! It sounds like I just don't have a good aqua scape to make shrimp happy. I do have one "cave"/overhang area as you can see in my pic below but that is where my circus goby hangs out. They are probably too afraid of him to hang out there as well. Oh well. Someday when I can upgrade to a bigger tank I will keep this in mind when I'm setting it up. Thanks again for the info!

you could always just add and lean another rock to create another cave.

[Jerad81]

1 hour ago, rough eye said:

you could always just add and lean another rock to create another cave.

That is a good point and something I will consider in the future, hoping I can win the aiptasia war I'm going through right now. Otherwise I might be starting over if I can't get these things under control.