Damselfly Nymphs!

[DIegor]

I have the unfortunate consequence of not treating a shipment of Wisteria that came in a few weeks back, and now am suffering from a Dasmelfly nymph infestation. I first saw one a few weeks ago, and decided today to take care of it, and in the last few hours I have caught 3 of the little guys. The problem here, is that I have ~10 RCS and a few Amanos in a heavily planted 10 gal low tech tank, so catching them and even spotting them is difficult, but I'm motivated to keep my shrimp safe, so I'm looking for a solution.

Originally, I thought about putting the shrimp in a separate tank for a week or so and raise the ammonia levels in the planted tank to ~5ppm to potentially kill the nymphs, and the tank has the ability to convert this load to nitrates pretty quickly too. I've also heard that the nymphs are quite resilient, so I'm opting for a second option:

The plan as of now is to do a complete teardown, removing all hardscape and plants, and then manually removing the nymphs. How is this best way I can go about this without putting too much stress on the shrimp? Second, what is the most effective solution I can put the plants in to rid them of potential eggs/or nymphs? Any advice on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

[Brandy]

The best solution is to move all your new plants to a quarantine tank and watch for further out breaks. The nymphs can't reproduce in the water, so there is no chance of your old plants having eggs. Simply reducing the number of plants and running the hardscape under scalding water is likely enough to make all your hitchhikers visible. I would try to leave well rooted plants and just comb through them with your fingers.