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Hi everyone, I have been having a slow die off of my CRS over the last few of months. I am fairly new to this so I am not sure how to deal with this. Tank: 28L Substrate: Fluval shrimp stratum (buffered to ~6.5) Current GH: 5 KH: 0 Temperature: 22 C Ammonia, nitrates, nitrites: ~0 ppm Bit of background: I started with 12 juvenile shrimp that I bought off a breeder in February this year. I started off using tap water (treated) with no problems. I got my first two berried females at the beginning of May. To this point I had had no deaths. At the beginning of June I had a couple (2) of deaths that I am still not sure the cause of. GH was low (2) at this time as I hadn't been testing for it, so that may have been the cause. Following those deaths I got some shrimp specific gh booster (saltyshrimp mineral GH+) and things seemed to recover. Berried females' eggs hatched at the beginning of June. One female became berried again in July. Now the tank was a bit overgrown at this stage so it was hard to keep tabs on the shrimp. I didn't notice any more deaths until a recent move. Before moving the tank I removed a lot of the overgrown plants. Once getting it to the new place I only saw 6 shrimp (2 females, 4 male) so it seems there were a few lost between June and August. There was one small shrimp in there as well (seems the only baby who survived). Since the move there was one death shortly after getting the tank set up. I chalked this one up to stress from the move. I haven't seen the baby shrimp since the second or so day after the move so I suspect that it has died as well. More recently I had a female die (at least I think it asa female). See the first picture below. I noticed one day that she was behaving strangely. My shrimp haven't gone up to ride the floating frogbit since the first month I had them but a few days ago I noticed one up there. I went and had a look and she was just standing there. I also noticed that she seemed to be missing her long antennae. I snapped the below photo and went to work. When I got home, she was still there in the exact same spot. A few hours later, she was on the ground lying on her side. I poked at her and it was clear she was almost dead. Once I was sure she was dead, I removed her immediately. I did a test of the water and all parameters were good except pH which was high (around 7.2). Seems my buffered substrate had run out of buffering capacity due to the use of high PH tap water. I added some fresh substrate and did a water change with RO water and the pH is back to 6.5. Water change was done over the course of the day 1 litre at a time to avoid rapid swings in parameters. My berried female was still doing well and her eggs hatched two days ago. She was active and seemed healthy the next day. Today I noticed her in the corner tipped over and not moving much. I snapped the below photo. I know the colour of the internal organs are meant to be a sign of bacterial infection, but I don't know what to really look for in a CRS. The colour in the second photo below looks odd to me. All limbs and antennae intact. EDIT: Just checked and the shrimp is dead. Anything I can do to try to determine the cause before I dispose of it? I am just at a loss at this stage. I feel like a bad shrimp keeper and I don't know what else to do. Does this look/sound like a bacterial infection to you? What can I do to fix this? Thanks for your help and let me know if you need any more info!

Hey all I am new to the shrimp thing and am a bit confused by a few things. But first a bit about what I have and want to achieve. I am looking at keeping Crystal Reds and Blacks and as my confidence increases trying for a few different types like Hulks and Blue Bolts and maybe a selective breeding program. I have a cycled rack with 5 tanks ( 4 x 3ft and 1 x 5ft) a common sump (3ft with normal media and a 10000 l/h pump with return so pressure isn't through the roof) and sponge filters for each of the 5 tanks. It has a 300w heater but I am thinking of adding a second 200w just in case of a problem. Will this be ok for the above shrimp or stop the sump and just use the sponges? And now for my newbie questions and things I would like clarified. - Pinto's are a hybrid shrimp of tigers and bees bred for specific patterns or is there something more complicated happening? - Can you have mishlings and end up with a few different bee type shrimp after breeding. ie 2 x mishlings bred and offspring could be KK or Hulk or Panda (or any others) depending on genes? - Can you ever breed true bees from mishlings? - When doing water changes do you gravel vac the substrate or just top up water? - I was planning to have the tanks bare with mosses and plants in pots to help with cleaning will this be ok? - I am using rain water it has a 6.8 PH, 0 KH and I don't have a test kit for TDS and GH is it necessary to have these tests and will I need something to buffer the water and keep the PH lower like ADA soil? - (I have read if KH and PH are low you cannot have a high TDS????) - Can you get Crystal Blues, Greens or Oranges and what is the difference between Pandas and Crystal Black is it just a slight colour difference? Please forgive any obviously silly questions as I have searched a lot on the net and confused myself with different information. I am also wanting to minimise any deaths so have not bought any shrimp yet until I am satisfied I know enough and can achieve what I would like to. Any extra advise would be appreciated thanks for the help and if you need any more information about my setup or anything let me know sorry again if anything seems obvious. Cheers :)

Hi SKF! I'm hoping to get some advice and opinions on managing pH for a tank with cherries and bee shrimps. My pH is measuring around 5.4 and I'm concerned it may continue to drop over time to unacceptable levels even for bee shrimps. Currently there is only CRS in the tank but I want to add some neos soon. Firstly some background detail - I have a tank with a modest amount of cal aqua labs black earth premium as per the manufacturer's advice. I use RO/DI water (I changed cartridge recently and TDS of RO is zero) with SS GH+. I keep up with regular WC and the TDS is about 140ppm at last check. The tank is heavily planted, has quite a few pieces of driftwood here and there and also some catappa/IAL. There is oodles and oodles of filtration including canister and air driven sponges, and the stocking rate is low-medium. There is some benibachi fulvic grains in the canister (although these fulvic grains are roughly 6 months old and should be close to expiring now; however I will still remove these fulvic grains when I get around to doing some maintenance on the canister however). The shrimp are quite happy and new ones are regularly getting berried. Anyway, so aside from removing the fulvic grains and possibly removing the indian almond leaf, and maybe some of the larger driftwood which may help to prevent the gradual acidification that is going on. I am wondering if anyone has experience using small amounts of aragonite or similar to help buffer the tanks. If anyone has any other suggestion or opinion it will be greatly appreciated. I don't fancy that cherry shrimps will breed very well in pH 5.4 or less and I really do want to keep some different coloured shrimps in this setup! I will be most grateful for any input :-) love n peace will -edit- I should add that it's true that as a last resort if it really comes to it then I could remove some of the substrate but I don't want to pollute the water in this way if I can avoid it..

First time shrimp keeper, but I do plan in bedding them. I had red cherries when I was breeding guppies but they got eaten buy the guppies.. 20 gallon long Biggest sponge filter I could buy at LFS 2nd biggest air pump I could buy at LFS 50w heater 7 crystal red shrimp not the best grade but cheap