Report

Here is a photo of the floating plant (Azolla). Looks great! I am probably tempting fate by even mentioning this but the first shrimp arrived yesterday and went into the tank today, fingers crossed.............. Pandas and shadow Pandas, I ordered blue bolts and shadow pandas so I may be getting the blue bolts next week free as it was the sellers (ebay) error, but at this stage it is one day at a time - will these survive even. Keep your fingers crossed for me please! I have to say I am enjoying seeing them in the tank even though black isn't the easiest to see in my tank as the background is black? The parameters are a bit off, GH 7 the main one thats off, but hopefully the 24 hours slow drip will have paid off and the parameters of the sellers tanks were generally close to mine, hence I got them from them for that reason. I guess it will be a 'black and blue' tank as there is no-one selling red ones at the moment, but blue bolts are my favourite and as long as they survive, well thats a bonus on the last attempt anyway so I'll take that as a win! Maybe sometime further down the line I may get back to what I had before??? Not rushing anything this time.

Time for another update! The PH this morning is 6 and KH 0-1 (you can't measure zero obviously). I plan to check everything tomorrow and then a water change on satuday. At the moment the TDS is 190 which should drop to 170 after a water change and then 150ish after the following/next weeks water change. Last time I checked GH it was 6, but again I will do ALL the tests tomorrow. I had to resort to using a PH/KH- product (AQUACID) to get to where these parameters are now but as the water I use has PH6, GH0 and KH0 I assume/hope I won't need to use that from here on, but will see if the parameters stay stable for the next week and have a PH alert disc in the tank which should indicate any significant change. I don't like using these sort of products as a general rule and wouldn't if there were any shrimps in situ and that product has raised the TDS at about .5TDS per drop. I may well order some blue bolts towards the end of next week (the road to the house will be closed for a month from 3rd June so it is next week or wait another 6 weeks) and see how that goes. I plan to drip acclimate them overnight this time so as to not rush that as it shouldn't get cold indoors overnight anyway this time of year. This all depends on the tank parameters staying stable for the next week (aside from the mentioned TDS adjustments with the water changes), though the GH  may drop a tiny bit with using just RO to reduce the TDS but that is fine, and even could be a bonus. I did manage to find some nice floating plant that I had before (good old ebay), and will try and get a photo of that at some point to attach, Azolla red I think it is called? Anyway, keeping my fingers crossed for now but all appears to be going well at this point! Snails seem to be doing well at least.   

That shrimp itself survived the molt just fine, but left about half dozen eggs still in the shell. I haven't measured KH in a really long time, but assume it is zero since I don't have any rocks besides a few small pieces of lava rock.  Maybe you have unwanted rocks in your tank?  My tank is the "long" style which I really like because I have a HMF on one end, and a pump outlet spout that shoots water all the way to the other end.  I have no idea how many shimp it can support because I don't really understand waste management in a tank.  Shrimp poop eventually turns into mulm, but then what?

As at time of this post the SL Aqua is available from this UK website, https://gbeeshrimp.co.uk/product/z1/

Just in case someone may be looking for the SL Aqua it is available from this UK website at time of this post, https://gbeeshrimp.co.uk/product/z1/