cb357

Answering a few questions here: - 10 gallon tank. Not sure if I mentioned already but temp sits at 76. Only the 10 neons and 1 mystery snail, that was tiny when purchased and is now massive - I usually find the bodies and some appear to have had trouble molting, others not. I’ve had some super small ones die almost immediately after putting them in the tank. Usually if they change in color they start to turn pale/white. I have also caught my mystery snail eating one of the ones that had died, so I’m assuming he has eaten a few. - when acclimating I have done like a 1/8th-1/4th cup of tank water every ten minutes or so for like 45 minutes. - I have also occasionally fed one of those nano banquet blocks to the shrimp - the copper content was from a report I found on my municipalities website for our water supply

1. I’ve always followed the instructions from the sources I’ve got them from, which I’ve tried different places. Best luck I’ve had are actually the handful I got from PetSmart with the two that lasted about 6 months. Floated them in the tank for about 30 minutes, then put them in small tub, slowly added some tank water before putting them in. 2. I try to change my water as infrequently as possible. I test my water a couple times a week and unless my nitrates are coming up on 25 ppm I only top it off or do like a 10-20% water change maybe every week and a half or two weeks? Nitrate spikes aren’t common, I’m assuming when I get them it’s me feeding too much so I usually skip feeding the next day too. When I do get them I still do the 10-20%. Haven’t seen ammonia or nitrite spikes. 3. My GH, Kh, and PH measure pretty stable at: - 75 ppm - 60 ppm - 7-7.2

I’m hoping somebody might be able to offer me some advice. I’m a newer fish-keeper that keeps killing any neocaridina shrimp I try to introduce to my tank. I have a 6 month old tank that’s heavily planted. Most of my plants are doing really well. I have some hard scape that shrimp can hide in and a sand substrate. In the tank I have 1 mystery snail and a school of 10 neon tetras that I’ve had no issues with, I only lost one tetra shortly after setting the tank up. They get fed hikari micro pellets and xtreme krill flakes. I have tried to keep neocarinidina shrimp since day one, introducing probably 15-20 to this point. Most of them never survived beyond a month. I had a couple that were first introduced 6 months ago that lasted until this past week, but now they too passed. They’ve been fed algae wafers and hikari shrimp cuisine. The tank is cycled, temperature is good, all parameters that can be tested on the general test strips and a master test kit have always been testing at acceptable levels, so I’m trying to figure out what else could be going wrong? Looking into it some more, I did find that my local tap water has copper in it, so I’m wondering if that could be the cause? Any help would be appreciated.