Petshrimp.com Discussion Forum

I have a 5.5g with rcs and was wondering if it is safe to add some crs...

75* F
7.2 ph
0 ammonia
0 nitrite
10 nitrate

kh and gh unknown not a part of my freshwater master test kit...

CRS prefer slightly acidic pH and soft water. If you know your water is hard then I would not recomend adding the CRS to your current tank. I kept some RCS in my CRS tank with pH 6.8, soft and CLEAN water and they did very well. Key here is "clean" water since CRS are more sensitive to water quality.

You can use R/O water to make the water both more acidic and soft.

Hope it works out for you, please update us

True CRS need acidic water, but I have heard that moderatly hard water is good for their outer skeleton.

I have my ph at 6.6 to 6.8 and my hardness is at 160 which is moderatly hard. It seems to be fine as I have several babies from different broods and all seems well. My tank is large and I may not see if babies are being lost, but to date I have only lost two adults in this tank.

I also had RCS in this tank but they were not colored up very well so I have been slowly removing them into tanks with more alkaline water, within hours they really got their red coloring back.

I got new Hino's this week and one is berried already and they are in a ten gallon tank with white rocks so when the babies are born it will be much easier to see if I am correct about the hardness not being bad for them.

Thanks for sharing and I hope to hear the results of you observations with the Hino's. They must be so pretty, I plan to get some when the weather warms up