TLP

Thank you for the replies, Everyone. I am reassured and will go ahead as planned. I don't know how long is sufficient for proper seeding, but it has been in the old tank a week by now. I also plan on adding some of the water and a bit of substrate from the old tank to the new one, as well. I figure all of that is way better than nothing, yes? It will also be heavily planted.

I am getting ready to set up a new deep substrate tank that will have a sponge filter with biological media. I ran the sponge filter for the new tank for a few days alongside an existing sponge filter in an already established tank to inoculate it using a dual port air pump. The pump died, so I disconnected the new filter and just let the original filter continue running with an extra single port pump. I left the new filter submerged in the tank. It has been there for four days or so. I was planning on setting up the new tank in the next couple of days. It just occurred to me that since there has been no water flowing through the new sponge filter for a few days that it may now be unsafe to begin using it again due to toxin build up? Is that true? Or will it be fine since it is still submerged and wet? Should I wash it, rinse it, or replace it, or do nothing?

So I have 4 cherry shrimp in a 2.5 gallon dirted tank. Three females, one male. Small sponge filter, leaf debris, tiny driftwood, tons of floating hornwort, one bladder snail, one adult ramshorn and many ramshorn babies. One of my females became berried. A week later the other two became berried. It has been a bit over three weeks since the first one became berried. I usually check on the shrimp every day. This past weekend, I did not check on them for a couple of days. Then on Monday I noticed that none of them are berried anymore. It has been four days now, and I have searched and searched every day since then looking for babies and have seen ONE. Shouldn't I be seeing many, many babies flicking and bouncing around? It's not like it is a huge tank. What is going on? Could something have happened to cause EVERYONE to drop their eggs at once, and if so, where did the eggs go? Nothing inside the tank has changed during this time. No water changes or adding anything to the tank and such. Confused.