sigh...

[Pea-brain]

I recently lost most of my shrimp. I don't wanna go into details right now but I did a water change and removed a big clump of najas from the tank and when i woke up this morning I found a large number of my shrimp dead (If i'm right I only have 3 left. 1 ghost, 1 tiny red nose shrimp with a yellow nose and a sand shrimp) my ammonia is really high and I don't know if I removed too much najas, or they decided to spike my water with an extra dose of chloramine which breaks down into ammonia when dechlorinater is added. Anyways I lost 3 red nose, 1 sand shrimp, 1 crs, and my bamboo shrimp (atyopsis moluccencis) Since I only have 3 shrimp left and a complete tank (and am too low on money to restock) I am thinking about going ahead and converting the tank into a SW tank and going ahead with the project i had planned and put a mantis shrimp in it. They are amazing creatures and I may have found someone who is giving 1 away. If I do that I might put up a journal in the "other inverts" section. I hope I can get back into shrimp keeping soon....

[crazie.eddie]

Sorry for your loss. I'm surprised your switching from FW to SW. It may cost you more to switch over due to equipment. It's best to use RO/DI water for salt, due to the possibility of algae problems when using tap water.

[argblarg]

Sorry about your shrimp. I recall at least two threads about added chemicals during winter time in people's water. What dechlorinator are you using that doesn't help with the chloramine/ammonia issue? It seems like most shrimp people use Seachem Prime which detoxifies ammonia.

[Neonshrimp]

Sad news about the loss I hope things work out with the mantis shrimp and we see your post about it Let us know when you do get back into shrimp keeping.

Take care.

[Pea-brain]

I use API tap water conditioner. I should have used my API ammonia detoxifier. I put some in after I removed the dead shrimp and checked the ammonia. As for algae problem when using tap water I plan to put some snails/crab/and a urchin in the tank. It looks like I'm goin to get a spearer type mantis which porbably won't harm the snails but may lunch on a crab or two unless it is a hermit. If I put shrimp in that tank it is lunch besides algae has never been a big problem for me. As long as the glass is clean enough for me to see I don't have a problem. Algae is actually beneficial as far as I'm concerned. and with a sand bottom like I will need as long as the sand is stirred algae shouldn't grow on it. Also i will probly get some macro algae which will compete with the micro algae for nutrients. As for more equipment I won't need it. Mantis shrimp don't need pristine water for survival so I don't need a protien skimmer or anything fancy. My sponge filter is good enough for what I need. And a deep sand bed means anaerobic bacteria which have the benefit of turning nitrate to harmless gas. A 1-2 gallon water change weekly is maintainance. And food is frozen shrimp/squid from the store soaked in selco food additive. (With an occasional live fish )

If everything is as planned it should be easier than my shrimp tank which took 2-3 20% water changes a week because I had consistent nitrate problems. always between 40-60 all the time. I suctioned gravel, rinsed sponges and filter media. I couldn't figure out why I had high nitrates. I heard najas can make high nitrates but that high? My tap water didn't have nitrates. My shrimp might have survived if they hadn't been stressed by the high nitrates too.

[rugie]

peabrain, Hi! I Am 71 years old and have had freshwater animals most of my life and salt water animals for the last 20+ yrs. I do not do fish anymore, I still have salt tanks and I also do freshwater inverts. I do not mean to insult or demean your intelligence but you are around 90% wrong in what you state in your posts. if you follow thru with what you describe in your new salt setup you will have an ugly smelly mess in a month or so. there are so many errors in your thinking it is hard to find a starting point here. you may not want to read what I state but what do you have to loose? a deep sand bed should not be stirred, sand!! must be an aragonite, coral, or shell material. not sand as we know it. the mantis shrimp will over time kill all other life in the tank. a sponge filter in a salt tank will produce so much nitrate that hair algae is all you will have. true the deep bed will chg the no3 to nitrogen gas but the chances are good that the nitrogen will reverse and end up as the start of the nitrogen cycle over and over again. tap water for a salt tank in most cases spells disaster. tap water should never be used untreated **EXCEPTIONS**
the use of selco as a food soak is not needed for the animals you suggest and it will foul the water. most frozen sea food is treated with nitrites, nitrates and other preservatives. I disagree that your tap water did not have nitrates, unless it came from from the type food you were feeding your shrimp it came from overfeeding or poor sanitation/filtration.
the way I read your post my opinion is that you killed your shrimp thru lack of knowledge. AGAIN! I say my intention is not to discredit you in any way, I would like to continue commenting on your post and perhaps pointing out all the errors but it may be an effort in futility, but I will do so if you would want my help. at this point I would like to see you stay with shrimp, I/we can all help you, & later if you want to try salt in addition to fresh help is here also. please do not be angry, I can not even count all the mistakes I have made in my time. stick with us! rugie

[badflash]

Rugie's advice is sage indeed. Ignor at your own risk. Rugie, thanks for the advice.

Someone that has been at this for 20+years is not someone to be taken lightly. No one knows it all, but experience speaks volumes.

[Pea-brain]

I have tested my tap water several times before adding it to my tank. The tap water has tested consistently 0 for nitrates. My tap water is always treated with dechlorinator, and I have no plans to stop treating it. In fact i may change to distilled water. I am learning SW and am currently studying as much as I can on the matter. By keeping the sand stirred I mean keeping small animals (Urchins, snails, hermit crabs) that wonder through the sand keep the top lightly stirred. Not manually. think of the mess The mantis shrimp I plan on getting is not a smasher (the ones that come in live rock and kill all your snails) but a spearer, or in this case a spearer that evolved into a smasher and then back to a spearer. it goes by the name Psuedosquilla Ciliata and does not have the power to kill hermits or thick shelled snails. I hadn't realized that a sponge filter would cause that many problems in a Saltwater tank though. I will remove it. I also just learned about the NO3 tranformation and didn't know much about it at the time I posted this. In fact thats the first time I've heard about it going back into the cycling process. Also Selcon is suggested by almost everyone who keep mantises succesfully. once to twice a week. This is mostly for O. Scyllarus as it has a nasty shell disease it can get if it's diet is bad, but a good diet doesn't hurt any mantis shrimp. There are people who have set up tanks like I described without them turning into a "Ugly smelly mess" (excluding sponge filter) And also people have been using store bought frozen shrimp (all natural w/ no additives) for mantises for a while.

I may have killed my shrimp though I do not see how. I'm sure there was something I could've done, but I don't know exactly what caused it. I had cut feeding down to only a few times a week, and continually siphoned the bottom and rinsed the sponges. I was feeding a mixture of flake food, slow sinking crumbles and small amounts of sinking shrimp pellets. never at the same time of course, but I mixed those up during my tri-bi weekly feedings, and only as much as my ghost and sand shrimp would consume in a few minutes. I would love to know what I did wrong with this tank so i could avoid future mistakes. Also rugie, could you clear up a question a can't seem to find? I've been searching on whether the FW and SW beneficial bacteria are the same and I've seen several conflicting views on it. Some say they are completely different, some say they are the same, and some say that they are the same but dumping them from FW-SW and vice versa kills them. Could you shed some light on this?

BTW my mantis shrimp will grow out of the 10 gallon in a few months, so I will have a empty tank which i may set up as a shrimp tank later on. I am not going to abandon FW shrimp. I don't think i could leave it forever (scary thought) BTW here is a link. In the middle you can see a spearing mantis raptorial appandage compared to a smashing appendage. Lurkers guide to stomatopods and a Info page on P. Ciliata mine will be the same bright yellow as the one in the pic but will lose the color with molts. And please if you have an idea what caused my shrimps death (or at least the nitrates) please tell me. thank you. Also my ghost shrimp and red nose shrimp currently reside in my friends tank. I converted him to a shrimp keeper. He's really getting into it.

[rugie]

Hello again glad you are not angry with me. firstly the bottled bacteria are a hit/miss deal, snake oil so to speak. the very best thing you can do for a new salt tank to cycle it, is to get live rock and live sand, these in combination will provide your tank with all it needs (over a period of a few weeks cycle time. (do you have a lfs that sells salt stuff?) I am familiar with the mantis you refer to. it can & will kill and eat urchins, snails, hermits, just a matter of time. the nitrate you experienced is the next to last step in the nitrogen cycle. it could have come from the reverse cycling, this often occurs from tight covers on a tank, (trapped nitrogen gas), it could have come from your substrate, the sponge should have been rinsed in old tank water, you say it is always treated with declor, yet your other post says you did not treat it for that water change?? selcon in a tank several times a week (with no adequate filtration will pollute your tank) the mantis will spear the shelled animals when their bodies are exposed. how does one know when they are getting all natural/no additives? shrimp and most shell fish are very high in po4 (your next problem nutrient) ponder on this for a bit, the tank is a captive system, animals res-pirating, producing waste, food going in one end coming out the other end rich in nutrients. etc, this captive system needs to be kept clean on an ongoing basis. filters are generally not used in salt tanks other than fish only systems, live rock, live sand and (optionally) a skimmer. most filters will produce no3 (bad news in a salt setup) when you removed tha najas grass you removed a no3 remover, most all inverts can not tolerate ammonia, no2 - no3 if you are certain that your exchange water is no3 free the I lean toward a minimum level of bacteria
due to rinsing the sponge (in tap water?) removing the najas, compacted substrate? tightly covered tank? it is hard to perceive no3 that high by accident. were you using any additives? for the plants? tell me about your substrate. I am happy you are not giving up on shrimp. going back to your forgetting? to dechlor the last water change (before the die off) removing the najas, rinsing the sponge thus stripping you tank of benificial bacteria coupled with the high no3 is what I believe killed your pets. hey! keep posting, please answer my couple of questions.

[rugie]

With all that you did you almost performed a tank breakdown, you say syphon the bottom, that may mean no substrate, but the detritus would have contained bacteria that produced the high no3 and there was no medium for bacteria to populate & reduce the no3 to nitrogen gas (if there was no substrate) no more plant, no more detritus, no more bacteria in sponges, high no3 == ammonia overload = death of lifeforms.

[Pea-brain]

I think that communication should go as follows. Put what you are discussing at the time before writing. because i'm getting confused as to what we are talking about.

Mantis:
I have never heared of spearers killing the exposed parts of hermit. Then again spearers aren't often kept compared to smashers. It depends on the personality of the mantis in question and how well it is fed. Some mantises, for example, will kill every tank mate, while some will leave tank mates alone. It is my understanding that sea stars do better than urchins, and urchins do much better than hermits in a typical smasher set up. and the selcon is not added directly to the tank, but the food is soaked in it. Also my question about the FW bacteria was because I have a biological additive, and also because I wanted to know if I could use a bit of material from my FW tank to seed the SW setup. Also, i do have a few LFS but none of them have live rock/sand. they all have bare bottom tanks. Also, most of the LFS's don't know what they are talking about and keep overstocked tanks in front of playing boomboxes, keep brackish crabs in FW without access to air, and several other things that are just plain scary. And most of them specialize in FW, and have very little SW stuff, though it is there.

FW shrimp: I rinsed the sponge in tank water when I did water changes. And I dechlorinated the last batch of water, but did not use ammo lock, which detoxifies ammonia. My substrate in the tank right now is not sand, but gravel/pebbles I bought from the LFS. This is a pic from back when I first set up the tank except I removed the sting ray filter.



My tank lid is not too tight and has several holes in the back. All the sponges were rinsed at the same time in tank water, plus the filter cartridge. I also kept the Java ferns in there when I removed the najas. Also I started siphoning after my nitrates didn't go down from 60-80 for a few weeks. that is also when i cut down on food. I WAS overfeeding back then. that was a few weeks before, if that helps.

[rugie]

sorry for the confusion, problem is much is being referred to rather than a definite one liner reply. of course I wish you well with your mantis I indicate their method of procuring food compared to the smashers to show how they can and do kill other lifeforms. lets take a golf ball size mexican turbo snail, when the snail is closed up the smasher can indeed smash it, the spear-er can not, but when the snail is moving about and has the fleshy part of it's body exposed it is then that the spear-er can spear it and cause its death. while the spear-er needs to wait for the perfect opportunity the smasher just walks up to the snail, etc, smashes it, eats it, end of story. yes you would be adding the selco to food (only reef tank with corals would have it added to the water column.) but no matter how it gets into the tank it is still in there. the tiny amount that may benefit your shrimp is minute compared to the amount added to the food that will not be consumed, that along with the amount passing thru the animal equals pollution. after prolonged selco use things in the tank begin to get slime coated. if you are bent on using it a touch of it to your finger and then wiped/rubbed in on the food would be quite enough in my opinion.

[rugie]

I may be grasping at straws here but, what if the same conditions abound ( & logic says it would) in your salt tank as did in your fresh tank. salt is far less forgiving than fresh. the way it strikes me is, it happened to one tank, so why would another be spared. my thought would be to find the problem that exists in the fresh tank before setting up another (that is far more complicated) so that the complications would not be repeated.

[rugie]

I see your very pretty gravel. that gravel has a coating of lacquer like substance to keep it shiny. it is not a good gravel for beneficial bacteria to colonize due to its lack of porosity and smoothness/slippery surface so chances are good that it was not functioning as a bio filter.

[Neonshrimp]

my thought would be to find the problem that exists in the fresh tank before setting up another (that is far more complicated) so that the complications would not be repeated.

I believe this is worth repeating!