My prawn (M. Rosenbergii) seems to be deteriorating. I've had it for almost 2 years now. I've also had the same setup routine for a long time and just recently this started happening:
Also the claws also started deteriorating really quick.
I figure it's due to a lack of calcium so I stuck a few sea shells into the filter... does anyone know why this is happening?
I can't tell what I'm looking at. What sort of pH is he in and what are you feeding him?
Beef up on high calcium greens, like turnip greens. You might also try some herp food that has added calcium. Just be sure that copper is way down on the ingredients list. For some reason lots of herp foods have copper in them.
Here's the part of the prawn that I took the close up of:
Here's the close up of the problem:
That's a hole in the shell, the edge of the hole is outlined with some sort of a black ring and it's been getting bigger over the last couple of weeks. Also the very tips of the claws are getting eaten away (too small to pickup with my camera phone), looks like how rust would eat away at metal.