Starting a big Shrimp tank...

Ok, so I have a Blk heavy duty 100 gallon stock tank they I cleaned well and outfitted with new Blk sand, heat, sponge filters/air and T5's...figure it'll be 2 mo before I can safely populate it? How should I proceed...shrimpers of the interwebz, help a brutha out...

TFP

Basically lookin for suggestions for plants that will do well and foster a shrimp population, and things in general I should be concerned with in regard to cycling a shrimp tank

100g... how will you ever find the shrimp?

My standard approach to shrimp tanks is a decent number of floating plants (amazon frogbit and water lettuce - fast growers that take up lots of nutrients) and miscellaneous other root and stem plants - generally slower growers to keep maintenance down.  Subwassertang, guppy grass, and any aquatic moss are great for shrimp as they increase surface for shrimp to feed on.  These aren't necessarily slow growers, but they're easy to remove for the most part.

Add the plants as soon as you can to get them established and add biofilm surface area.  The more plants you have, the less you have to worry about a cycle.  Use media from another tank rinsed in the new one to jump-start your sponge filters and it should cycle pretty quickly.  

2 months is definitely enough time.  With shrimp I worry more about the presence of biofilm than the cycle since I generally insta-cycle my tanks with used media and lots of plants from other tanks.

Aquabid has lot of sellers of different species. At the swap-shago, tina, BillHN,  and others will bring shrimps.  Here is a list of species compatibility
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Yeah, the main problem I can see with a 100 gallon shrimp tank is, you probably won't be able to see any of them until the population really explodes, they are really good at hiding. I had shrimplets in my 10 gallon that I didn't even know about until I tore that tank down, moved eveything to a 20 gallon, then tore that tank down and moved to a new house, and when I was pouring water back in I finally realized there were rcs shrimplets in there.

You should be able to get an absolutely monster colony going with that amount of space. If you want to jumpstart biofilm production, I would suggest getting a bunch of cheap small fish like neons and feed them like crazy. With my limited experience, I have found that biofilm grows much faster with fish than with just shrimp. I guess fish are just better waste producers?

Or maybe shrimp are better biofilm consumers! When establishing my latest shrimp tank, I left lights on double time to allow algae to build faster. I'm using subwassertang as the plant for the tank, though in the past I've also used java fern to great success. Algae = shrimp heaven.

Another option some folks may object to is to let green diatom algae take over the tank. It may be hard to do, but it would be the perfect food for the shrimp.

Biofilm growing on tank surfaces requires nutrients to thrive - just like any other living thing.  It stands to reason that the more nitrogenous waste that's introduced, the more certain bacteria and algae that comprises biofilm will multiply.

I would vote more for living things generating new nitrogenous waste to encourage biofilm growth than mulm that has accumulated at the bottom of a tank.   That mulm has already been at least partially "processed" by bacteria and other aquaria and will thus have less nutrient value.

Wow, a 100 gallon tank for shrimps.  can you say SHRIMP MEGALOPOLIS   

Any updates on this? Looks like i'm starting a 25 gallon shrimp tank