Can someone link a previous thread to help me decide if I should be worried that I don't yet have shrimp in my pond?
Well, your BG will be fine without shrimp. You can grow monster BG without them if feeding and all other conditions are right. I like them because they are 1 more layer of forage. Most all forage species boom and crash, so the more species you have, the less pressure on any 1, and the more likely the BG have a steady supply of food. Even shrimp have a down cycle where all you have are very tiny young. (shrimplets?)
I have a little bait pond about 10x10x3' deep in which I grow FHM and shrimp. Water is pumped from the main pond by a small solar powered pump. A while back the pump quit, and the water level went down a foot and got very hot. Well, my FHM all floated up dead, but the shrimp are still alive and flourishing.
A minor benefit of shrimp is they utilize a resource that not many other creatures utilize. They are detritus feeders, feeding mainly on dead vegetable matter. The dead vegetable matter normally accumulates on the pond bottom as smelly sludge. In a perfect world, the shrimp and crawfish would consume all of the detritus and recover that lost resource. However, I guess even a heavy shrimp population would eat only a small percentage of it. But hey, it's better than nothing!
