Hey there,
New to the hobby. I've got a good friend who has way more experience helping me along the way. He suggested I post here about my shrimp problems. Apologies for the wall of text...
A little under a month ago I bought 6 neocaridina shrimp which all died within a week. About one a day. Half of them appeared to be failed molts as they had the "white ring of death".
I thought that maybe it had to do with how I acclimated them. I dripped acclimated them (after floating the bag for a bit) over the course of about 90 minutes. The bag was in a separate container during the drip process. After the deaths occurred I thought back on my process and considered that maybe the temp dropped too much during the drip acclimation (as the bag wasn't floating during the drip).
This past weekend I purchased some Amano shrimp to try again. This time I drip acclimated for around 90 minutes with the bag floating in the water the whole time. The shrimp were added to the tank on Saturday and I started to notice problems yesterday (Wednesday). One shrimp was on his side/back twitching in a way that seemed like it was trying to molt. This morning it was dead, hard to tell but I think I saw a white band on it's back leading me to believe it was a failed molt. I found one other shrimp corpse in the tank under a leaf, snails had got to it though so it was hard to tell if it had a white ring.
My GH seemed like it may be a bit low (as seen below) so early today I added some seachem equilibrium to raise that up a bit, I will test again once it's settled and ran through the filter. I expect it to have raised the readings by about 3 dgh.
I realized that it may just be a result of my water not being hard enough, but would that cause the shrimp to die so quickly? Fully possible that I just didn't have a grasp on the chemistry behind GH/KH, and never had my levels high enough. But figured I would check here to see if anyone had further insight!
One weird thing to note. When I was acclimating the first batch of shrimp I added an air stone to my tank as I didn't think I had enough surface agitation. That seemed to create an interesting effect on my water flow. Debris would be drawn towards the air stone and settle on the substrate in it's general area, this is also where I found the majority of the dying/dead shrimp. I have since swapped out air pumps for something quieter an that has a bit less flow (now using the USB air pump from Aquarium co-op with an adjustable flow valve on the tubing).
Info on my tank:
pH - 6.6
Nitrates - <20ppm (I use Easy Green, Nitrates were at 0 before I started using fertilizer)
Hardness - 4 GH
Nitrite - 0
Ammonia - 0
KH/Buffer - 3 KH
Water Temperature - 77-78 (inconsistencies with thermometers)
I will be testing for copper later today when I borrow a test kit from my buddy
Weekly ~20-25% water changes, light gravel vacuuming as the plants and hardscape make it difficult to get to much of the substrate. I also condition my water and do my best to match water temps during changes. I typically use a small container when doing a change, I have a Python on the way.
Planted community tank. 20 Gallon long. 10 Ember tetras, 5 otocinclus, 2 zebra nerite snails. Good amount of "pest" snails (ramshorn, bladder snails, MTS). I keep the light on the lower side and added catappa leaves to make for a darker environment to keep the embers happy. The leaves have been in the tank for close to a month and seemed to have no noticeable effect on water parameters.
