Shrimp dying

[Myrkk]

Hi,
I have a small 27L tank that I moved my blue velvet shrimp into as they weren't happy in my big tank. The water parameters are spot on except the hardness is 3 and pH is 6.6 so I added a bit of cuttlefish bone for the shrimp to snack on.

It's a very lightly planted tank as one of the first plants I put in it melted and caused a huge mess. It's stopped melting now but I haven't added anything else to the tank to let it settle. Yes, I did cycle the tank before adding any livestock.

There were 6 blue velvet shrimp, 3 small celestial danios and 5 teeny tiny rasboras. The tank has been puttering along ok for a while and then last week we went away for 5 days. I did a 20% water change before I went and all seemed ok.

I came back to one dead shrimp, it looked like it had been dead a while so I took it out and everything seemed fine.

Yesterday I did my usual am check, all ok, then approx. 4 hours later I walked in to find all bar one shrimp dead on the tank floor. They had a yellowish saddle which I am assuming was eggs. The shrimp left is, I think, a male. There was a moult next to the shrimp.

The room the tank is in is my spare room/study and no cleaning products were used in , nothing has got in there i.e. cats/dogs etc.

I checked the water parameters again and all where they should be, just did another water check but I'm worrying about the shrimp in there and loathe to put anything else in there.

One thing I can say is the water smells fine until I do a water change and then the detritus that I suction out of the sand stinks. I assume this is the bits of melted plant I didn't suction up and thought that it will eventually disappear as I do water changes.

The only think I can think of is to strip the tank back, change/wash the sand and start again.

 

[Demeter32]

Perhaps the shrimp didn't acclimate well to their new tank. The fish might of picked at them enough to stress them out too. It is possible that the one dead shrimp had produced a enough ammonia to kill off its brethren.

27 liters equates to about 7-8 gallons, which is really small to have any type of schooling fish in. IMO the minimum for a school of CPD is 10gals.

 

[thrujenseyes]

you say lightly planted...
not much room for them to hide and you have the cpd (which are kind of crammed into this small tank and need more room to swim about as they are active).
My guess, is they're chasing and stressing the shrimp.
Also I think CPD need harder water than you have?

I recently witnessed my endlers hunting my dwarf shrimp to the point of killing and I'm heavily planted.
I rehomed my endlers.

Honestly I think the only shrimp safe fish is probably an Otto and maybe the tiniest of the rasboras like the brigittae.

 

[Essjay]

Cpds do need it slightly harder than 3 dH. Seriously Fish gives their range as 90 to 258 ppm (5 to 14.4 dH)



For those who want to look something up on Seriously Fish for the duration of the site not having any text in its profiles, simply go to the textless profile, copy the url (address) then paste it into Wayback Machine. That's how I just looked up cpds



In the 54 litre tank I had to close I kept red cherry shrimps with Boraras maculatus and pygmy cories. They are all now in my 180 litre tank which has a lot of live plants attached to wood, plus hornwort and water sprite. Also in the tank are Espei's raboras (a close relative of harlequins) Daisy's rice fish and peacock gudgeons (gobies). The shrimps are still thriving, there are lots of berried females and juveniles though it is very difficult to see any babies. I can only assume the reason they haven't all been eaten is because of the amount of hiding places.

 

[thrujenseyes]

Daisy's rice fish

I had to google this fish as I'd never heard of it before!
What an interesting and adorable little fish!!
Why do we never hear of these?!
I'd love to see some pictures of yours!

 

[Essjay]

A photo of two of my rice fish Oryzias woworae. Male on the right (slightly out of focus) and female on the left. The photo doesn't do them justice as both sexes also have bright blue eye rings.

I had to tempt them with some food to take the photo, I used an algae wafer as that's the only food I have that would stay where I wanted it

 

[thrujenseyes]

View attachment 86045 A photo of two of my rice fish Oryzias woworae. Male on the right (slightly out of focus) and female on the left. The photo doesn't do them justice as both sexes also have bright blue eye rings.

I had to tempt them with some food to take the photo, I used an algae wafer as that's the only food I have that would stay where I wanted it

Thanks!!! They’re really adorable! Algae wafers are always a great way to get fish to corporate foe pictures!!!


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