RCS random death woes

[Jedidiah]

Originally Posted by sewingalot

Jedidiah - Welcome to the planted tank! How often do you feed your fish and how often do you change water in your tank. I don't think it is the co2 by what you are describing in the first post. It sounds like you are having a mini cycle of sorts.

I usually do 25% weekly or bi-weekly... lately monthly atleast.
The deaths were related to the food, I think... as switching to the crab cuisine, and dosing kents iodine seemed to have stopped deaths.

I did have a CO2 swing last week, and lost one otto... I haven't seen a shrimp since, so I suspect the cherries are gone.

The only thing left in that tank now are snails and 5 ottos, and 2 corys. I've since re-added a couple guppies and two barbs for hair algae.

Staghorn, which looks similar to what UG put down, is putting up a battle with manually removing them.

I've been watching amonia, it's been faint but there the last two tests I did.

I highly suspect a mini-cycle of sorts, as I gave my javamoss a dunk in a 1L-30ml hydrogen peroxide... for a few hours. I rinsed really good...

But, both times, I've had cloudy water afterwords... hard to tell if it's while or if it's green.
It definitely killed the algae on my moss, which the guppies and barbs (then) eat.

I should really document better. I've also been slowly rescaping, and getting rid of some stems (which may not have been smart) but it is still heavily planted.

[Jedidiah]

Originally Posted by wendyjo

Have you ever used copper containing meds in the tank?

I had the same problem when I tried RCS - they just died for no reason - typically after a feeding. Like, I would feed, they would eat, and 2 minutes later they would die. Nothing was wrong with the foods I fed and it didn't seem to matter what I fed them Was very sad and I never did figure it out.

Noxich was used around the 2-3 mo mark when it was used as a breeding tank. It was planted, and shortly after, there was a healthy population of both amanos and cherries.

There's not much of anything that thrives in this tank but grasses, starplant and riccia (it thrives everywhere like duckweed) (both of which I've repeatedly thrown out by the bucket lol!)

My drawf hairgrass is really spreading out good, but it's been a year. The original planting, I dont think it grew an inch from it's spot. only now since the new setup (now atleast 7 mo old) has it really gone wild.

Still, doesn't explain my wierd shrimp deaths... I suspect food... I'm staying away from nutrafin stuff now.

[tsunamisurfer]

Originally Posted by Jedidiah

Hi guys,

I've an aquarium set up a year or more ago. It crashed about six months ago from neglect when I changed jobs...

Water tests perfect for nitrite, ammonia and nitrate..

Hi....

Sounds like the tank is cycled, when was the last test? Before or after the crash?

Were there any medication in the tank before?

Do you de-chlorinate or age the water before changing it?

What % of water do you change each time?

Are you adding anything else to the water?

Are there any other fish in the tank chasing or stressing them out?

Originally Posted by Jedidiah

Shrimp randomly die in the numbers lately. If it keeps up, I'm afraid I wont have any left!

Food is Nutrafin Max, Spirulina wafers.

I've tried to find out if it's the food, but when I stop feeding, they die too. They seem to go weeks without food fine, but some still randomly die...

right now like 2+- per day... so I'm stuck as to what it is.

I can relate to your problem as have had the same problem, for months I had deaths and no births whatsoever.

Here is what I did to turn the problem around (I am not suggesting that any single regime change was the sole factor in the shrimp's health).

- I started using my office's filtered water (transport about 2 litres home every day).
- I de-chlorinated my water and aged it 24 hours.
- I started doing weekly water changes of NO MORE than 25%, I always vacumm the gravel. Furthermore when I put new water in, I use the Gravel Vac again to slowly trickle the new water back in (reducing temp and water parameter shock).
- I set the temperature to 24 - 25 Degrees C.
- I STOPPED using pH down or Seachem's Neutral Regulator to bring and keep the pH @ neutral. Phosphates are off the charts!
- I used DIY Co2 to bring the pH from 7.4 (my tap water) to 7.0.

I usd to get 1 - 2 deaths a day in my 20 litre tank, now I get about 1 death a month.

I feed mine everyday Spirulina tablets broken into bits and spreadout throughout the tank (everyone gets a share, not just the big ones).

Once a week I give them a treat, Hikari Crab Cuisine (protein and iodine), they love it, but I cannot give them too much.

Once a week they fast.

I have lots of mosses in the tank to give the shrimp hiding places to feel safe.

[Jedidiah]

The medicated water was changed out months before the crash.

The tank was testing clear when I was losing shrimp which was months after it was reestablished. I lost almost 100 shrimp.

I moved the few left to a separate tank. So far, they mostly live. No breeding yet.

I switched from nutrafin algae wafers to hikari and the deaths stopped.
The algae wafers are not coming to my lfs now... so bought hbh super soft algae pellets. One berried mom dead.

So far the others seem to be doing well.

They're not making much of a dent on thread algae now though... they were doing awesome before. There's 5 females and one male now.


I think it was the nutrafin food that was killing them. That single mom may have been from hbh supersoft's copper protienate or a small dose of flourish excel. Dont know yet.

[Heartnet]

Originally Posted by BottomFeeder

I have a 15g shrimp tank that was established almost a year ago. I started with 30 and they were doing well until I had a snail outbreak. That led to an ammonia spike in my case and I lost a bunch.

To get things going again, I did some deep gravel vacs and cut back a bit on feeding. Once the snails subsided the colony slowly grew back. I think it takes 2-3 months before the babies seven mature enough to determine the sex, longer for them to start to reproduce. It took a good 4-5 months before the population was noticeably larger and it has been growing exponentially since.

On another forum this week I mentioned how I finally started feeding them to my cichlids again since that 15g tank is crawling with 100s of them. I've introduced at least 30 to my 29g tank with Apistos. Some will make it there, some won't.

How much of an impact can a snail-population-explosion actually have on RCS? I never even thought of that as a possibility. But looking from that view, would it actually cause a large enough ammonia spike to kill off RCS that fast?

Lately, I have also been seeing this inverse relationship between my ramshorns and RCS. I had around 50 RCS when the ramshorn pop was still hovering around 10 adult snails with a scattering of juvies. Now, I barely see any RCS at all (prob 10 to 20 at most) and my ramshorn pop is probably floating around 100 with a good mix of adults and juvies. It's a 10 gallon tank.

Jedidiah also mentioned that he had a explosion of snails sometime around his RCS's decline. Could it be in any way related? Or is it more likely due to a diet/water quality issue?

[Jedidiah]

Originally Posted by Heartnet

Jedidiah also mentioned that he had a explosion of snails sometime around his RCS's decline. Could it be in any way related? Or is it more likely due to a diet/water quality issue?

Hi Heartnet,

My snail populations are still thriving, as are the few crs that are in that tank.
The assassin snails pretty much killed off all of my mts's; the pond snails (tiny round flat guys) are still in crazy numbers. There's a few empty shells of both in the tank.

Meaning, that the snail population didn't seem to have an effect on the shrimps. My tank doesn't test clear anymore, but I also dose pfertz.
(They're still bellow the range the test kits can read at the end of the day though)

[Jedidiah]

Now have yet another tank started up. The two moms seem to lay on their sides and flick their swimmerettes...

They get up and graze but usually lay on their sides and kick. Sometimes they use a back leg or two to comb their swimmers.

I dont see any eggs left, I think they've all 'hatched'.

Is this part of the molting process? I've never seen it before. I usually add iodine, but because I'm on the other side of the nation, I havent bought iodine.

The tank seems to test ok. Slight amonia, less than 20ppm, and nothing reading in nitrite or nitrate yet.

[fishsandwitch]

That is extremely high ammonia.
All your shrimp will most likely die, sorry to say.

[Jedidiah]

Originally Posted by fishsandwitch

That is extremely high ammonia.
All your shrimp will most likely die, sorry to say.

LOL you had me goin there for a minute!

I made a typo. .20 ppm

Still too high?

[fishsandwitch]

Okay, thats a lot better, and .20 is okay for a short amount of time but it is critical you dose prime to neutralize it.