Learning through more tanks

In this blog post i would like to share my journey from a learning perspective over the years. I always have this question in my head, how can one learn and experience quicker. As shrimp breeding cycle from breeding to shrimplets to selective breeding takes years, can we accelerate the process with more tanks and can anybody from a hobbyist perspective upkeep this?

So i think we all started somewhere and i too started with 12 tanks and then as time goes on expanded to more than 100 tanks, does it mean that having more tanks equate to better shrimps?

The long and short of this is Not Necessary.

Time

One of the more influential factor is time, having more tanks means more time needed or a more complex process/infrastructure to ensure time isn’t been taken away too much for it is still a hobby; albeit very passionately.

Taking water change and reset for example, if we have 12 tanks weekly water change and reset once every 8-12 months all the time adds up.

This calculation is a very rough estimate of what could have happen, and if we first started off with 12 tanks the time taken in a year is 5 days. 5 Full Days  doing nothing but water change for 12 tanks.

If we would to expand to 100 tanks with the same method and process it will then become1 month. This seems a bit unsustainable as out of the 12 months we have in a year, 1 month is doing nothing but water change.

Hence, when businesses or hobbyist decided to scale up, we try to save time by doing what takes the most time. Water change and reset, which lead to automation.

Automation, semi automation 

This is where we can see hobbyist start with  automation and yes even for us we started semi automation when i increase my tank count from 12 to 17 to 24 where i use gravity as discharge without having to drill holes in the tank. Yes slower but certainly a start.

In addition, we moved away from RODI to just DI. DI speeds up the process by filling the tanks up at the speed of 20 seconds per Litre. The draining process is 10.7 seconds per Litre.

In my YouTube and Blog post i have shared some of the methods we have used for water discharge and top up.

Tracking

When it comes to 12 tanks, we can still recall when was the last time a reset is done, a water change is done, a feeding is done.

When we multiply the number of tanks, the increase in complexity increases drastically.

At least for us tracking data is highly critical to ensure we know what is going on with one glance with some automation this excel sheet updates whenever we input in the raw data when the water change was done and a dashboard shows when we will need to do the next water change. The formula can be adjusted based on your water change intervals.

This gives a good overview of what needs to be done, when.

Finances

It is important for us to discuss in depth what it means to progress to more tanks as the whole process from 12 to 100 to 200 tanks require a direction and a viable plan.

From a finance perspective on expansion, we are looking at almost 7x the initial cost setup for 10 tanks to 100. This exclude all livestock/shrimps which will exponentially increase the cost.

More tanks even a conservative calculation, shrimps cost increases exponentially.

So does it mean there are no benefits to expansion?

If you have read this far, it means that inside of you there is something that you’re looking for in terms of rationalizing. If we put this across a few years of progress it will certainly help to put this into perspective.

Learning by doing and experience is by far a great journey for many hobbyist including myself. Different shrimps different lines and even learning the difference between main line and secondary line takes time.

Learning

• With more shrimps, you’re able to learn their behavior water parameters and breeding cycle better
• With more tanks, it forces you to think through the infrastructure piece ensuring that you do not lose time because of an expansion plan
• Helps convince yourself and make more mistakes as the more mistakes you make the better for own learning
• Be able to discern between a claim vs observation experience
• Able to create new shrimps
• Able to improve current lines

There are many benefits to learning and to really put your knowledge to the test.

Selective breeding

With more tanks does not necessarily means better selective breeding. That is also the reason at the onset of this post i mentioned it is not necessary that expanding is beneficial. The direction and intent is important when expanding, and personally if we’re worst off than when we started, it will be detrimental to other parts of our life.

Selective breeding is a strict, discipline and consistent process where shrimps are move around with an intention in mind. The removal of shrimplets from one tank to another to grow up is part of the process and having more tanks allows you to do selective breeding more accurately. After talking to many global breeders, i do find there are certain characteristic and personality traits that breeders have in common if they’re willing to go the extra mile to selectively breed their shrimp and undergo the hard work to do so.

Selectively breeding are often loosely use and mentioned, but it entails a very strict process and a laser focus approach and not for everyone.

Personally, even with the many tanks that we run, we openly share that we do not do selective breeding for all shrimps types as we will easily run out of tanks if we do for every tank. However, what we do is to remove the shrimps with undesirable traits.

Outcome

The quality of the shrimp will be a good indicator if the process should be tweaked to further optimize or major changes need to be made. The question here still remain if your lifestyle is able to keep up with the number of tanks?

At the end of the day, this is still a shrimp hobby, and you can decide where you would like to take this to. Doesn’t mean that you cannot have fun during all these and you probably should find fun doing this.

In this journey we believe if automation to water change is considered then it is certainly viable to expand. How many tanks? I would recommend anything below 100 as the diminishing returns starts at 100 and move where projects can easily be neglected. However, who am i to tell you this ? So go ahead and expand because only when you’re there, would you be able to look back and say ah….. yes…. this make sense. One thing we can be certain of is the learning curve through more tanks and shrimps does gives you a more holistic understanding of shrimp breeding.

Hope you all enjoy this post!