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From Pellets to Greens: What Nourishes My Shrimp
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Oct 2, 2023
It can be hard to know what to feed your shrimp to give them a nutritional, balanced diet. In this video, I share with you all the foods I feed to my shrimp. š š š š š š š š š š š š š FREE copy of my new Neocaridina Shrimp eBook - https://fishkeepinganswers.com/shrimp-ebook/ Links to products used in this video š API Copper Test Kit - https://amzn.to/3nOZpWX š Seachem Copper Test Kit - https://amzn.to/3plClzn š Fluval Stratum - https://fishkeepinganswers.com/a7ub (Amazon.com) š Hygrophila corymbosa - https://fishkeepinganswers.com/5rp6 (Amazon.com) š Twisted Vallisneria - https://fishkeepinganswers.com/j5md (Amazon.com) š Cryptocoryne wendtii - https://fishkeepinganswers.com/12no (Amazon.com) š š š š š š š š š š š š Filter intake sponges š https://fishkeepinganswers.com/tk1i (Amazon) API Master Test Kit š https://fishkeepinganswers.com/pceu
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0:00
Hello friends, welcome back to the channel. Now I'm frequently asked by subscribers and viewers to my YouTube channel
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why it's the best food to feed to my shrimp. And whilst I can't tell you the best food for you to feed to your shrimp
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I can share with you what I feed to my shrimp and what I have found works for my shrimp and my colonies
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Now it's important to point out this isn't a sponsored video, nobody's paying me to tell you about these products
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I'm simply sharing with you the products I genuinely use on a daily basis. So let's get started
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So I would say the food I feed to my shrimp probably on a daily basis is the Tetra Pro
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Color Crisps. I love these little wafers. They're a sinking wafer so I just put a little pinch in
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each aquarium. They quickly sink to the bottom and the shrimp seem to relish them. They come from all
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around and quickly clamber all over these little wafers. Now I feed these to my fish as well and I
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don't know in all honesty whether or not they have any color enhancing abilities on shrimp
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but I definitely think where I feed them to my fish I definitely think those fish
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have brighter colors so I like to think that these tetracrisps do help enhance
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the colors of my shrimp truth be told I don't know if they do or not I've never
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run an experiment with two tanks side by side and I fed one these and one lot of
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shrimp a different food but this food seems to feed incredibly clean and by that I mean it doesn't fall apart the minute you put it in the water it does
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seem to stay stable in the water at least long enough for the shrimp to
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clamber all over it and start picking it apart. And if I've got a tank with 15 or 20 shrimp in
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I might put a very small pinch of these wafers in the water, let them sink. And if the shrimp
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consume them within an hour or two, that's probably about the right amount. If they're swarming all over them and seem to consume them incredibly quickly, then maybe I need to feed a
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little bit more. I wouldn't want to find these were still sitting in the tank five or six hours
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later because they will start to break down and they will start to pollute your water. But this is probably the food I feed on a daily basis
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Now another food I love to feed to my shrimp pretty much every day is fluval bug bites
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And this is a sinking formula. This is designed for bottom feeders. Truth be told, it does sometimes float
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I'm a bit old-fashioned. I like my sinking foods to, well, to sink. So I do tend to take a pinch and put it just below the surface
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Then it sinks pretty quickly. One of the main ingredients in this food is black soldier fly larvae
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larvae. You try saying that three times faster. Now according to the packet these pellets are about
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1.4 to 2 millimeters in diameter I suppose. And again as with the tetra crisps a small pinch for
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15-20 shrimp seems to be about right. They will quickly come into this food and they will quickly
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consume it or at least my shrimp do. And this is another food that if you have fish in the tank you
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can feed the shrimp and the fish the same food. Now sometimes people contact me and say Rich the
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problem I've got is as soon as I put food in, the fish are all over it, the shrimp don't
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get a looking. Well there's two things we can do here. One is to cautiously feed a little
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bit more, don't chuck handfuls in, but if you've got half a dozen guppies, if you put
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the sinking food in one side and a little bit more on the other side there a good chance the guppies will go after the first lot and the shrimp will go after the second lot but it doesn always work out The other thing you can do is wait until lights out
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and then feed the sinking food. Most fish don't feed once the lights go out
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assuming the room is dark and you've all got the sunbeam in him, whereas the shrimp will happily feed day and night
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They don't ever seem to sleep. Blue bull comes in a couple of different varieties
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I suspect the ingredients are much of a muchiness. Just make sure you get one that definitely sinks
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It's no good to your shrimp if the food is floating on the surface. So next up is another Tetra product, and this is Tetra flake food
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And this, I'll be honest with you, is a food I've been feeding to my fish, certainly
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and my shrimp more recently. Since I started in the hobby back in the 1990s
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I can distinctly remember this being the food that my local store sold
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and it's what we fed to all of our fish, and I've carried that on with my shrimp. Being a flake food, it does tend to float
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but all I do is I take a pinch, put my fingers below the surface, crumble it, it will sink quite
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quickly, most of it, some will float but the majority will sink down and the shrimp will be
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all over it. I find using a flake food is particularly good if you've got baby shrimp in
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the tank. Baby shrimp don't tend to when the small move very far, they will often end up staying
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close to or in the same spot the female drops them. When you sprinkle flake underwater you'll
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find it does disperse across the whole tank and that's great for getting into rock piles and into
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clumps of plants where the baby shrimp are typically lurking whereas something like a
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sinking pellet when you drop that in it tends to plummet like a stone and land more or less where
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you sprinkled it so if you've got babies in the tank go for something you can spread around
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so now another food i'm sure you guys have heard me bang on about repeatedly is rapashi gel food
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and rapashi gel food is a bit unusual you buy that as a powder and then you when you're ready
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to feed your fish or your shrimp in this case you mix a certain quantity of the powder with
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freshly boiled water and you mix it up and it smells like well it smells like death to be fair
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it absolutely stinks until what will happen is once you mix it up it then solidifies and goes hard
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and what you tend to do then is to cut it into cubes and you can either store it in the fridge
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for a few days or be like I do, I store it in the freezer for weeks at a time. I tend to make up a
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fairly large batch, wait till it solidifies, cut it into cubes, break it all out and freeze it
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Then whenever I want to feed my shrimp, I can just go and get one cube per tank and plop, plop, plop
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drop it in. I love rapashi gel food because it stays stable in the water for ages. I can drop a
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cube into one of my tanks and that cube will first will be absolutely surrounded by shrimp
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but more importantly they can spend the next 24 or even 36 hours feeding on it
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Now this is another great food if you do have fish and the fish are getting the
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food before the shrimp. If you put a cube of this in half an hour before
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lights out the fish will get their fill, the lights will go out and then the
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shrimp will come out and they will smother it If you go to your tank an hour or two after lights out with a small torch shine it in on the repashy it be covered in shrimp Almost guarantee it Now repashy comes in a number of different flavours At the moment I got community blend
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and grub pie on the go. I think they're all much for a muchness. Some have additional ingredients
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There's one called Soylent Green which has pea meal in it and it has algae in it. It's designed
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for your algae eating plecos and such likes. Shrimp, love that. That smells even worse than
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this when you're making it. I don't know how they managed it, but they're obviously got some very
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clever scientists. The other great thing about rapashi is you can, when it's in its liquid form
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before it solidifies, you can dunk stones in it, which is great for plecos that want to rasp
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or you can do what I do, which is get sticks like this. And I essentially make a rapashi lollipop
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Stick that in your aquarium, and again, the shrimp will crawl all over it. They love it
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So another food I often feed to my shrimp, but I don't have any right now because I've run out
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is algae wafers. And algae wafers seem to be relished by shrimp
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I suppose, although the algae only makes up a portion of the wafer
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shrimp do love algae in their diet. And you will find, if you plop two or three of those in
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to a decent sized colony, the shrimp will quickly be clambering all over those algae wafers
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and they do consume them quickly. Personally, I use the Hikari algae wafers
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I find they hold together well in the water. They don't disintegrate the minute you drop them in
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but the chances are the one you choose will be whatever's available. As with any food, I would
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suggest you buy a small packet, you test it with your shrimp. If your shrimp enjoy it and it feeds
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the way you want it to, it doesn't disintegrate, it doesn't make your room smell, then go with it
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Don't let anybody else tell you you have to use this product or that product. If it's working for you, then do it. So I don't just feed my shrimp dry food, pellets and wafers and such likes. I also
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feed a fair amount of frozen bloodworm. I tend to buy it in cubes, although you can buy it in slabs
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as well. Frozen bloodworm and frozen brine shrimp are both particular favorites, certainly of my
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shrimp, and they're both high in protein. And protein is really important for female shrimp
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Female shrimp need plenty of protein in their diet to be able to develop a good, strong, healthy
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clutch of eggs. In fact, protein is so important that when we are really trying to ramp up a colony
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we might feed bloodworm to our shrimp every other day or sometimes every single day particularly
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if we've got a large colony if you've got three or four hundred shrimp and you drop a couple of
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cubes of frozen bloodworm in within a couple of hours they've eaten the entire lot it's all gone
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it's full of protein and it doesn't have fillers dry food has to have fillers and fillers essentially
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help the way for the pellet hold together without the fillers you wouldn't have the food it wouldn't
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work and fillers do get a really bad rep on the internet people will often take a food and go
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oh it's got cereals in it oh it's got brewer's yeast in it shrimp wouldn't eat brewer's yeast
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in the world no of course they wouldn't but then nobody goes and chucks wafers in in the wild if we
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just chucked in here dead fish bugs and rotten fruit it'd be a disaster our tanks would be in
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a hell of a state we have to feed manufactured foods and they have to have some sort of binding ingredient Frozen foods however don have that It tends to be the product a little bit of water frozen job done
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I also feed my shrimp some natural foods I suppose you might call them. Stinging nettle leaves are one
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of the favorites in my shrimp tanks. You pick some fresh stinging nettles, some that you know are
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free from pesticides and herbicides and such likes. You put them in boiling water for two or three
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minutes allow them to cool slightly drop them in your tanks and the shrimp will be all over them
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they really do consume them quickly i know a lot of other people will also feed their shrimp blanched
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vegetables personally i always find the plant vegetables make my water smell i don't i don't
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know why that is um but things like carrot green bean peas they're often fed to shrimp and again
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if you're trying to get together a balanced nutritious diet for your shrimp the more variety
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of food you add the better. So if you find that zucchini or carrot or or pea or lettuce works for
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your shrimp then feed them. Fabulous. The more variety the better. Now the last food I want to
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share with you that I feed to my shrimp is bee pollen and bee pollen comes as small tiny little
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granules. I don't know why it's bee pollen not just pollen but anyway. Now bee pollen is said to be
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high in minerals that the shrimp need for a healthy balanced system. I understand it gives them
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something that they may not get just eating a pre-prepared flake or pellet diet. Unfortunately
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the bee pollen does tend to float so you do have to put a pinch below the surface and it does fall
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apart pretty quickly. It's not designed to sit in the aquarium for hour after hour so what I tend to
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do is just take four or five small pollen balls in my fingers below the surface gently release them
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so they drop down without falling apart. Bee pollen works really well if you use a feeding dish
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because if it does disintegrate, it doesn't then all fall into the gravel. It tends to sit in the
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bowl, in the dish, and the shrimp can access it, and they really do seem to relish it
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Now what I tend to do on a daily basis is I will feed my shrimp every single day with either the
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tetra crisps or the fluval bug bites. That'll be one of the feedings, and then the second feeding
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I try and get something frozen into their diet. And if I do a third feeding, then it might be the flake
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It might be an algae wafer. Or maybe I'll add a nettle leaf, whatever it might be
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The key to successfully feeding your shrimp and the key to developing a large, healthy, happy colony is variety
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If you just pick one of these foods and you just feed it day after day after day and you don't add anything else to their diet
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yes, your shrimp will probably be fine. They'll find plenty to eat. They'll find plenty of bacteria and biofilm they can eat
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But if you really want that colony to grow and to thrive and what most of us want is lots of baby shrimp
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Then variety is the key the more variety you give them The happier healthier they will be so I think it's fair to say that feeding a varied diet is one of my secrets to breeding more shrimp
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And if you want to know another seven secrets to building a large shrimp colony watch this video next
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Thanks for watching
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