Self sustained tank / mini eco system

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Isn't that the same thing?

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Rams will eat every shrimp in that tank. Try planted tank with as many cherries as you can with a few dwarf puffers to hunt the shrimplets.
 
Rams will eat every shrimp in that tank. Try planted tank with as many cherries as you can with a few dwarf puffers to hunt the shrimplets.

Dwarf puffers are 10x the hunters as rams. Had one clear an entire infestation of mts in a very short period of time, in a heavily planted 25g. Would love to see what a few could do to some shrimp.


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I disagree. Just because it would be difficult doesn't mean it is impossible. You would need the right balance of prey to predator. For example, a 125 gallon tank heavily planted fully populated with cherry shrimp and guppies (and microorganisms, invertebrates, infusoria, etc)... would all these populations crash if you added, let's say, one golden wonder killifish? I doubt it. Somewhere between that and too many/large predators is the right balance. The eventual complication with the rams is that they will breed and when their population gets large enough they might decimate the shrimps and whatnot. You would need a predator that would eat the ram's fry to control their population, but not decimate everything else. Of course it is complicated, but not impossible.
 
One thing I would love to try is to keep a thalassophryne amazonica (prehistoric monster fish) in a tank with self-replenishing populations of guppies and cherry shrimp. Would this work in a 10g probably not, the monster fish would likely crash the feeder populations. How about a 20? 40? 75? At some point, the tank is large enough that a single sedentary ambush predator will never catch all the guppies and shrimp. The key is finding the proper balance.
 
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