Welcome to our forum doozer999, I'm glad you are enjoying the site and hope you will find it useful.
I have a set of guides that will help answer most of your questions hopefully, you can find them here.
Introduction, guides and information for the Opae ula shrimp.
These shrimp are very easy and fun to keep, you don't need any special equipment either! In short all you need is a tank (yours is perfect) fill it with RO water and add around 350grams of marine salt and let it dissolve, add any substrate and rocks (shrimp safe - free of dirt and metals) add a light and leave the tank as is until you get some green algae growing. Add the shrimp and that's it! No water changes needed and feed once a fortnight.
Obviously you can use something to measure the salinity as you need to hit around 1.010 - 1.015, testing for ammonia, nitrites and nitrates is always great and you need to keep your PH very high, this is why I use crushed coral or ocean rocks as this keeps it high constantly. If you measure all parameters and keep them tank perfect you will have much happier shrimp that will breed. The black rocks are just lava rock and they do hold a lot more beneficial bacteria than standard rocks but it's not compulsory. Plants are a difficult thing in brackish waters as most die pretty fast, other members have gotten mosses, algae, macroalgaes and marimo balls to survive so have a browse over the members tanks and setup section for ideas.
The most important thing with these tanks is to feed extremely little and not very often, you are just supplementing their diet which is algae and biofilm that grows naturally in your tank. You don't need a filter so keeping the nitrates low is priority number one because doing less water changes and disturbing the shrimp the better.
I hope this helps, I'm writing on my phone so please excuse my grammar lol, any more questions then please post again :)
P.s here is a step by step guide to setting up the tank in this thread:
http://opaeula.co.uk/page/how-to-setup- ... 5913#guide
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