Lighting and it’s importance
Using Light to your advantage
A shout out to a breeder down under and this post is dedicated to you. Your question regarding if lighting helps with shrimp breeding. I think the long and short of this is it will really depends. What kind of answer is this?
Sunlight is the food source of everything and it is important to the entire ecology of Mother Nature. So is lighting important to breeding, yes it does to a certain extend but does not have an immediate impact however critical.
The reason for this is because light helps plants such as moss and floating plants grow and make food which in turn provide shelter and food for microorganism. In the same line the plants also help cultivate biofilm providing food to shrimps. With this it may appear that lighting is important.
Does shining light for long hours make shrimps nicer? No it doesn’t. Light does not make a shrimp nicer by shining long hours on it. They too do not get sun tan like humans do. The only thing that is achieve certainly is a higher electricity bill.
Type of lights
There are plenty of light choices in the market now and are fairly affordable. When i first started this aquarium hobby it was only florescent light tubes and then then Pressured Lamp and moved on to T5/T8 and eventually now with LED with multiple colors for different purposes.
I have used quite a number of light sets before and for shrimps it is rather straight forward, since we are not growing high light plants, then there isn’t really a need to splurge on high end light sets. However, it is important that the lights promote growth of your plants at least and not so dim that even mosses don’t survive.
For shrimp keeping both T5 and LED are recommended, however i will now lean towards LED because it is light, doesn’t give off too much heat and have a very long lifespan.
T5 light sets are fairly heavy and i have retired my T5 light as there is a need to change the tubes annually and it is expensive to keep it running. LED on the other hand can be cable tie to the rack and or place on the tank and easily moved around since they are lightweight.
The prices for LED nowadays are as affordable as T5 if not more affordable as the massive shift towards LED. With more advance LED light set there is also dimmable feature, sunset feature, timer, wifi all inbuilt.
Currently because it is fairly affordable to get LED lights hence i’m using Chihiros normal white light LED which does the job well.
how much light is sufficient
Generally if you see plants such as mosses and floating plants growing then you have sufficient light for your tank. I’m using a 6000k Chihiros light there are 5 levels of light intensity i’m setting it to level 3 and they are doing great. When the entire ecosystem is well establish and mature, while light doesn’t appear to have immediate impact but overall it does help.
Just like lubao/kallax ball which create biofilm, while they don’t have immediate impact but overall it helps with the ecological system in your tank. This is yet another soft value that is often overlooked.
So does the amount of light helps or impact breeding, indirectly it does because a decent amount of light certainly still help with the whole eco-system hence all these small sum adds up to a successful breeding experience.
Hope you have a good read!
