What hitchhiked in with the farm plants: a census
Ten farm boxes have come through this house since 2024, and every single one carried passengers. Most are harmless; one nearly ended the shrimp project. This is the census, ranked from "ignore" to "act immediately," with what changed in my quarantine process afterwards.
Ignore tier
Bladder snails. Three to fifteen per box, no exceptions ever recorded. They clean, they breed to the available food, and their population collapses on its own once feeding stabilizes. Culling is optional bookkeeping.
Seed shrimp (ostracods). Appear as tiny white specks scooting across the glass at night. Harmless to everything, mildly ugly at population peak, and the shrimp apparently eat their young. They peak and fade on their own.
Ramshorn snails. Rarer than bladder snails from these farms, prettier, same policy.
Watch tier
Planaria. The white triangle-headed worms showed up in box four. They hunt shrimplets. My population stayed small enough that a trap and two weeks of reduced feeding handled it — I skipped chemical treatments entirely after reading what they do to shrimp in underdosed tanks. If the census ever shows planaria in numbers, that is a decision point, not a curiosity.
Hydra. Same shrimplet risk category, same "watch, then decide" policy. They arrived once, on a moss bundle, and vanished after the tank went a month without overfeeding.
Act-immediately tier
Dragonfly nymph. Box nine, riding inside a rolled Java fern frond. I found it because the shrimplet count stopped growing and a ghost shrimp turned up hollow. A dragonfly nymph is an underwater ambush predator that will eat a shrimplet a day and an ember tetra for sport. It was removed with tweezers at 2 a.m. under red light, which is the most engaged I have been with this hobby at any hour.
What the process looks like now
Every box since box nine: plants go into a bare quarantine tank, not the display, for two weeks. A nightly flashlight sweep runs the whole stay. Alum dip for anything going into the shrimp tank proper. The census sheet hangs on the wall next to the tank — species, date, box number. It reads like a ship's log and it has already caught one nymph early, in quarantine, where it cost nothing.
On treatment folklore
Everything you read about dips assumes you are trying to save the plants at all costs. Quarantine shifts the goal: the plant can die in quarantine and the tank stays safe. That reframing is the whole trick.
The farms are not sloppy — box ecology is just what happens when you ship living plants wet, per the shipping post. The census continues. The dragonfly count remains, strongly, at one.