Huge Riccia Mat Challenges

Recently I have decided to clean my riccia mat from some soft green algae growing on it. As you might know, the best way to clean plants from algae is to put them into a tank where you keep a big and healthy colony of shrimps. Shrimps will not spend much time to eat every little piece of algae away. They will and eat dead parts of the leaves. Algae and decaying leaves are their natural food.
One of my 10g shrimp tank had a big riccia mat. You can see it surrounded with big ‘mini water lettuce’ floating plants.

Riccia mat takes almost all space in my 10g tank

That aquarium is old and no one is living there. This was a reason why algae started to grown; it was no shrimps to use it as a food
So, I moved this mat and put it into another tank where I keep lots of painted fire red shrimps. In 4 days the mat was perfectly clean and I decided to move it back. Here is a challenge came. It was lots of tiny shrimps that have chosen the riccia as their home. I did not want to lose my shrimplets and decided to wash the mat in a bucket of water. After that, I was going to catch shrimplets one by one and put them back in a tank. However, I was surprised by a quantity of little shrimps I found in a bucket once I remove the riccia mat. It was at least five dozens of little shrimps.
Anyway, catching tine shrimps is not a problem for me, since I have to do that every time I vacuum some of my tanks. As I said, it’s not a problem, but it’s still quite time-consuming exercise
After washing the mat at the first time, I replaced the water in a bucket and did that again. It was a next surprise, I still saw quite a lot of little shrimps in my water. It was hard to tell how they managed to hold in a riccia, but they were.
So, long story short, but I had to ‘wash’ my riccia four times and I think I caught about a hundred little shrimps that were initially hiding in the mat.

Look at some pictures of this riccia. The pictures are made from the top.

Riccia floating plant

Riccia has tine leaves

Bright green color makes riccia a perfect plant for aquascaping

Riccia fluitans is a floating plant, top leaves are often come out of the water

Riccia fluitans always needs a least a medium light