HELP! Cherries keep dying!
Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2015 11:50 am
Hi! I am hoping maybe to get some help with my cherry shrimp. I have purchased 3 batches from an online vendor, and they are fine at first, then over time, they die one by one. I have had a few batches of babies from some females that arrived already berried, and one batch on my own, but in general, they don't breed, or the few rare times they have, they drop the eggs. They are not as active as they should be either. I have searched the Web for answers, but come up empty. I love these shrimps and want to have a happy colony! Here is where things are now: The tank is 5.5 gallons, with built in filter, which contains carbon and a little crushed coral. I do not change the filter out. It is over a year old, and I cycled it very well before any life was put in. It is fairly heavily planted with java moss, fern and small anubias. There are a few small rocks that some plants are attached to, and a few small pieces of drift wood. The substrate is black aquarium gravel. It is heated and stays 76-78. The tank lights are on during the day, off at night. I do not use any CO2 or ferts. The only chemical I use is Seachem Prime for new water (and when I set it up). I do a 10% weekly water change, with tap water, treated with Prime, temperature matched and added slowly to the filter area. The surface is well agitated with a small airstone. There is a little bit of a current at the surface due to the flow from the filter. The ammonia, nitrate, nitrite, chlorine, chloramine always read 0, and I use a dropper test. PH is 7.6 and is steady that I know of. I do use a strip test for KH, which is 80 ppm, and GH is 300 or more ppm. I do not know what my TDS is. I have tested for copper. It was 0. There are a few existing shrimps from a batch of babies I did have several months back, and maybe two from the last 10 I ordered not even a month ago. There is one small horned nerite snail, which seems fine, and some pond snails that came in on the wood. A few of them die here and there, and they are not reproducing a lot lately. There is also a tiny baby guppy that I rescued months ago in there. Interestingly, she has not grown at all. The plants are doing great. I feed a super tiny bit of crushed up fish food for the guppy daily, and will drop a very tiny piece of algae wafer in from time to time. The dead shrimp look normal, and do not act ill, I just find them dead. A few have a whitish band between the tail and thorax, but I see successful molts too. Yesterday I found 4 total laying there dead. Two looked normal, two had the white band. This is the most to die in one day, and usually it’s just here and there. Is it my KH, GH or TDS? I can’t figure it out. Thank you…