It's been a busy couple weeks, but I thought it may be worthwhile to update this thread. Last week, after what seems like an eternity, I finally found obvious proof that the red cherries are finally doing well enough in my tanks. I managed to find 3 babies about 1/4 inch long
I now think the initial problems were caused by my method of water changes. I was keeping everything cleaned, but was using about 25% weekly. Once I finally changed over and started doing about 3% daily everything started eating more, molting less, and the results are obvious. I've tried taking pics, but my macro skills seem to be limited to objects larger than 1 inch
Glad you found something that works for you. Sounds like you have something in your water the water conditioner is not taking care of. Sorry if I missed it, what brand are you using?
When my town switched to chloramine I found that Prime just wasn't cutting it any more, and that even with Amquel+ the water needed to be aged for 10 minutes + before adding. Now I have no problems with 50% weekly water changes.
I had been using thiosulphate when I originally started this project, but switched to using Prime on a hunch about 3 weeks in. There was no real change, but the deaths stopped. This is the point that I noticed that they were molting more often than what would be considered normal. I assumed that this was caused by the changes in nitrogen levels from freshly changed water. That is when I started doing the smaller partials from the cycled/more stable tank.
I noticed the berried female a couple weeks ago, but still wasn't sure that she was going to carry successfully. The last thing I wanted to do was put it out there that I had finally been successful in getting a spawn and lose all of them. There are not nearly as many as I had expected, but at least they're there.
