three-fingers
Fish Connoisseur
The best thing to do now IMO would be to invest in your own liquid test kit.
LFS's often use the test strips, which can oftn be pathetically innaccurate.
If they used a liquid test, chances are it was out of date. The boxes don't actually have use-by dates on them, just lot numbers, so the LFS may not know.
Depending on the test kit, they become very inaccurate 3-5 years after manufacture.
Also, naturally it's in an LFS's interest for the tests to be inaccurate, as long as it fails showing 0ppm of ammonia/nitrite/nitrate (as out-of-date kits often do), so even if someone working there was aware of this, they may not do anything about it or tell the staff. This way they can sell more fish...
It's very unlikely the shrimp died of stress from the fish.
Since you have a small tank with three messy fish, the tank is only recently cycled and your filter isnt the most efficient design to cope with the fish you have (Stingray filters have a high turnover rate but only a puny amount of biological filter media) - everything seems to point to something wrong with the water conditions.
Have you removed the chemical media cartridges from the Stingray yet? The zeolite and carbon in them can screw up the cycling process, and unless replaced frequently they will lose all effectiveness.
LFS's often use the test strips, which can oftn be pathetically innaccurate.
If they used a liquid test, chances are it was out of date. The boxes don't actually have use-by dates on them, just lot numbers, so the LFS may not know.
Depending on the test kit, they become very inaccurate 3-5 years after manufacture.
Also, naturally it's in an LFS's interest for the tests to be inaccurate, as long as it fails showing 0ppm of ammonia/nitrite/nitrate (as out-of-date kits often do), so even if someone working there was aware of this, they may not do anything about it or tell the staff. This way they can sell more fish...
It's very unlikely the shrimp died of stress from the fish.
Since you have a small tank with three messy fish, the tank is only recently cycled and your filter isnt the most efficient design to cope with the fish you have (Stingray filters have a high turnover rate but only a puny amount of biological filter media) - everything seems to point to something wrong with the water conditions.
Have you removed the chemical media cartridges from the Stingray yet? The zeolite and carbon in them can screw up the cycling process, and unless replaced frequently they will lose all effectiveness.
