Giving up!

[Kenshin]

I think I am about to give up on keeping shrimps as a hobby. I bought this awesome batch of shrimps from this website, and everything arrived in perfect condition. I netted out all shrimps and placed them into my 20L gallon tank. I netted out all of the none RCS shrimps, but with varations of blue and red Neocaridina species crosses from my tank and placed them in a 2.5 gallon tank with crushed corals as a substrate and a nice piece of driftwood with java moss attached to it (tank cycled of course). A day later, I bought a green hedge plant from Pets'mart and placed them in my 20G tank. The next day (yesterday), I found several of my shrimps have died already. Prior to that, I have already placed a small handful of crushed coral in a filter mesh bag, and placed them inside my filter (Emperor, and I also have a sponge filter inside the tank as well, from Elite - double sponge - air driven) to buffer the pH of my tank (7.2), and to stablize my kH [8], and GH is [8]. Everything else was good, ammonia, nitrite, nitrate are all 0. Yesterday, my tank's temperature was 84F, so I decided to put some ice and water into it to sort of cool it down. The ice comes from the auto ice-maker in my fridge in which the water is filtered first before the ice-making process. This morning, I found several more shrimps have a nice white band color within their body which I know it means stress (bad sign). I also read from this website (thanks to Mustafa) about some of the reasons why shrimps would die, and so I quickly removed the green hedge plant from my tank yesterday; fearing it could be the toxins from the pesticides or etc. I have done a water change 30% 3 days ago, and used Seachem Prime to remove chloramine. The only thing I could think of is maybe I fed my shrimps everyday with fish flakes (but I do not feed them that much), which may have caused overfeeding. Yesterday, I observed one of dead shrimp shells are cracked (between neck and body) and towards the tail part of the body. My tap water has a kH of 3 and a GH of 3 also. But for the shrimps that are in my 2.5 gallon tank which also has a couple of green hedge plant from Pets'mart all survived and no death. And I only feed them every other day. So in conclusions:
I do not really believe it is the green hedge plant that was the cause of death (since I rinse them well really good), and I really never had a problem with plants that I have bought from before.
My kH and GH should be fine since I took up the advice from Mustafa already, and there has never been a fluctuation in pH at all.
Ammonia, nitrate, and nitrite should not be the problem since it is at 0.
No more fertlizer addition already for close to a month already.
25-30% water change is carried out once every 2 weeks, always used Seachem Prime following the dosage in the bottle.
The one and only one reason might be from feeding. I will try to make myself to only feed once every 2 or 3 days from now on, and very sparingly. I still have a decent amount of healthy RCS in the 20G tank, and if they all die, I will just give my shrimp-keeping hobby and switch back to fish-keeping hobby. I will update my progress on how it goes down the road. If you have any advice you can give me, it would be really greatly appreciated, or if you think some of my conclusions that I have came up with is wrong, please let me know. From then, thank you very much and I wish I was a good shrimp-keeping hobbyist like most of you are already (with jealously)

[IndianaSam]

Don't give up!

First of all, get all the green hedge out of your tanks and promptly return them to the pet store since green hedge is not an aquatic plant. My shrimp tank is a 10g with lots of Najas grass and Java Moss. Both plants work very well for me and the Najas grass is great for removing excess nutrients.

I would also stop feeding the shrimp everyday. They really don't need very much food.

That's my advise. I'm sure that someone else will chime in and can help you more.

I'll repeat: don't give up! Just hang in there.

[Mustafa]

Sorry to hear what happened. There are two things that stuck out in your report. First, *never* put ice directly into a tank to cool it down. Use a fan, air con, whatever else but never ice. The melting water from the ice is literally *ice-cold* and can kill, or at "damage" them irreversably, shrimp that are swimming around the melting water. Imagine being in 84 degree water and someone comes and pours a bucket of almost freezing water on you. Shrimp react more dramatically to that. *Any* sudden change in their environment can kill them.

Second, as "IndianaSam" pointed out, the Green Hedge is not an aquatic plant and is likely to have been treated with pesticides. You might have been just lucky with one of the plants that did not immediately kill your shrimp.

The best thing to do when keeping shrimp is to do as little as possible. Small, infrequent feedings, small water changes, small additions or subtractions to and from the tank...etc..etc.

Hope this helps somewhat.

[GunmetalBlue]

Hi Kenshin, just a comment, but if the ice-maker water is connected to your tap at the back of the fridge, even if it's filtered, to my knowledge, it doesn't completely free water of chlorine and chloramines. But no matter, as Mustafa says, using ice is not a good idea.

My general experience using fans is that it can work for locations whose temp is too warm a part of the year. I use a small "desk" type plastic fan clipped onto whatever works (but not the aquarium). It's amazing that fans really do cool the temp, so at first you really have to monitor it because cooling down too fast isn't good either.

I have a target temp I keep in mind that I don't want to go over, in my case 80 degrees. So in other words, don't wait till it's too hot then quickly try to cool it. Sometimes just leaving the hood open and keeping the aquarium lights off is enough. But if I see that the temp will still be climbing, that's when I use the fans. I only leave it on half an hour or so at a time, just lowering the temp a degree, then turning back on when it nears 80 degrees again. Of course it's only practical if I'm home. AC might have to do at other times.

Many of us have had losses, even complete disasters. Sharing the problems helps people possibly avert some of them; it's all part of the learning process. And I'll admit that the learning process seems unfairly doled out sometimes (for instance, we have bad water quality in my locale including very hard water, high PH). It's discouraging at times, but you're doing the right thing - checking through each parameter and seeing if that might be the problem.

BTW, have you ever had your water tested for metals? That has been a problem for some people too. Hang in there!

-GB

[bgssamson]

Everything else was good, ammonia, nitrite, nitrate are all 0.

You said you have a cycled tank, right? If so the NitrAte shouldn't be at 0 unless you have a heavyly planted tank that eats up all the nitrate. Maybe just maybe your test kit is expired, another thing is if you planted the hedge you might have disturb the benifical bacteria buy stirring the gravel/substrate that causes the mini cycle. IMHO


-Brian

[Callatya]

Depending on the size of the tank, a freshly cycled tank can have no measurable nitrates for the first month or so, even if its not planted It takes a little while to build up to the point where it will register on most test kits.

[bgssamson]

Depending on the size of the tank, a freshly cycled tank can have no measurable nitrates for the first month or so, even if its not planted It takes a little while to build up to the point where it will register on most test kits.

hmm... first time I heard that! As far as I know you will have a trace even a small amount when your tank is cycled since the ammonia will turn to nitrIte then NitrAte. This is how you know that your tank is cycled.

-Brian

[Kenshin]

The tank is really heavily planted(a lot of Anubias nana attached to driftwoods, lots of java moss attached to another small piece of driftwood, Limnophilia sessiliflora (ambulia), baby tears, Didiplis diandra, Ludwigia (narrowleaf), dwarf subtulata, corkscrew vallisneria, Limnobium spongia (frogbit), red tiger lotus, and of course algae). . I will post a picture in the near future. Those plants have already been established for almost a year already, flourite as a substrate. And the test kit I have bought was just recently, Freshwater Master Kit from drfostersmith.com
It works really good.
For all of you that have give me great advice so far, I would like to thank all of you. So far, I have listened to all of your advices and have not witnessed any shrimp deaths recently. I have transferred all of the Neocardina sp. (non red cherry kind) to a 2.5 gallon tank with crushed coral as a substrate, good size driftwood (boiled out all the tanin) with lots of java moss wrapped around it, and a sponge filter. They are doing really well also. I have 1 pregnant female that finally have eggs and she has been carrying those eggs for more than 4 days now (YEAH FINALLY!).
So far none of her eggs dropped, and I believe I have another female shrimp of the same kind carrying eggs soon also. In the past, I have had RCS carry eggs for less than a day and dropped all of them. I also took out that hedge plant already. My RCS are doing fine and developing their ovaries and I have not witnessed any new shrimps developing a crack between their neck and body so far. And no more dumping ice/ice water directly into tanks anymore. So hopefully if that goes well, I might finally be getting female RCS to carry eggs too and have babies like all of you have experienced. I barely feed all of the shrimps now, probably once every 2-3 days only and just a tiny pinch of crushed flakes only. So once again, thank you very much. I will update more about my RCS and others later on and post a pic as well.

[Chaca]

Not that one can't keep shrimp alive in a 2.5 gal, but you would have more margin for error in a slightly larger tank, such as a 10 gal.

[Kenshin]

I would love to another shrimp tank. In fact, I would love to have a lot of shrimp tanks each of 10 gallons with 1 species of shrimp for each tank.
However, I do not have a big house and I am on a budget. I have a 2 year old son and another baby coming soon. In addition to work and school, it is very hard for me to maintain a 20 gallon tank with shrimp and plants, a 2.5 gallon tank with shrimps, and another 20 gallon tank with 2 red slider turtles. Plus with all of the crazy grass mowing (living in the south w/ a quarter acre is too much for me to handle) and me being a "city boy". Finally with all the house errands, it would be very hard to maintain more tanks (bigger in size wise).
That is one of the most important reason why I have stated this would be my last shot in keeping shrimps as a hobby with all these factors.
But hopefully, when i graduate I would be able to have more time (and also moving to a bigger home) to be able to set up more shrimp tanks.

PS. The Necardina sp. female shrimp is still holding her eggs (2.5 gallon tank). I believe it has been at least a week already. And still no shrimp deaths (YAHOO!! ) My tank picture(s) will be posted soon.

[Lotus]

Would it be possible to use a divider in your tank to separate the shrimp? Maybe that would help cut down maintenance.

You're definitely going to have your hands full with two small children, but it's nice to keep an "adult" hobby to help with your sanity