Blackwater Bloody Mary Neo Setup

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

On 6/29/2023 at 1:59 AM, nabokovfan87 said:

Just got done with the night check on the shrimp.

Scrolls up to check when the last update was

Alright, well....

Since I overdosed the salt we do have a bit of an update on everything.  Initial salt treatment saga I have above, that day I lost a few.  I also lost a few overnight.  I've done two bucket swaps of 5G of water in the tank and this is simply to try to get things a bit more stable and find the right activity / stress level for the shrimp.  Adding in the salt has done wonders for triggering molts, allowing me to remove the eggs en masse as well as removing the parasite from the shrimp themselves.  I did opt to pull one shrimp today, it was one of them that just looks really poor in terms of overall health and it seemed like it was determined to spread whatever sort of disease was going on.  It is the one I photographed a little bit ago, but it's just simply a very weird looking shrimp with some internal issues visible through the shell. 



@Chick-In-Of-TheSea see above from previous photo compared to the ones I sent earlier today.  I believe this is the same shrimp with that yellow section showing as well as the other discoloration we saw today.

Super strange @nabokovfan87.

I lost a wild shrimp overnight. The shell split for molting down near the tail instead of behind the carapace.  

[nabokovfan87]

Little tiny baby shrimp.

 

On 6/29/2023 at 10:13 AM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

On 6/28/2023 at 10:59 PM, nabokovfan87 said:

Expand  

Super strange @nabokovfan87.

I lost a wild shrimp overnight. The shell split for molting down near the tail instead of behind the carapace.  

Very strange! It can happen though if they are thrashing a bit I would think. I was looking for molts and found a head of someone. 😕

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

On 7/4/2023 at 4:14 AM, nabokovfan87 said:

Little tiny baby shrimp

😍

On 7/4/2023 at 4:14 AM, nabokovfan87 said:

I was looking for molts and found a head of someone

😳

[nabokovfan87]

It seems we have a bit of a hatch this time around!  Thousands of little zoes released.  The tank does have some salt in there, but I highly doubt it's "enough".  The zoes are going to be around for at least a week and maybe a little longer.  Typically they will be in this state for about 5 days or so.  It would be totally awesome if this tank got a random green water spike, but we can't have everything work flawlessly for us!

......alright so here's the dilemma.  The amano shrimp female, gojira, released her zoes and now they are "in the way"  so to speak if I want to do a water change.  Salt went in on the 9th and we are at about day 5 in terms of treatment.  I would not be against leaving the salt in there, but I do know that it's better for the Neocaridina if I remove that salt.  They need the clean water and if they sit in salt for a bit too long there is a compounding affect.  I did lose one adolescent shrimp this morning.  this was the first shrimp that I had lost for this round of treatment.  This doesn't say much for the sake of this dosage on the shrimp because again, we have the compounding of the earlier treatment, the length of that salt treatment, and then we have this treatment a little bit of time later.  There has been a lot of water changes prior to this second treatment, but I have kept things stable for longer and have not done a water change for at least two weeks now. 

I've been pulling molts and my hope is we are done with the treatment.  Letting this salt sit for as long as possible would ensure this!  The amano shrimp zoes may have a bit of a higher survival rate, very unlikely, but even if they do not they would sink to the bottom and be a pretty awesome bit of neocaridina calcium supplements!  I guess this is a good reason for having some amano shrimp and a clown pleco with your caridina or neocaridina shrimp because there is a bit of symbiosis there. 

I will likely end up checking the tank tonight, check for more deaths or stress signs, and then try to leave the salt in there until the normal Wednesday water changes.  What would you do!?

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Rubber band pantyhose on the end of the tube and keep the tube up high in the tank to remove the water.

[nabokovfan87]

On 7/14/2023 at 6:30 PM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

Rubber band pantyhose on the end of the tube and keep the tube up high in the tank to remove the water.

But I don't wear those!!!!

The maintenance thing is just the salt concentration. If I change water, salt goes down. Good for neos, bad for amanos...... This just leads to a rabbithole where I want more amanos. Which.... Guilty as charged.

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

On 7/14/2023 at 9:37 PM, nabokovfan87 said:

This just leads to a rabbithole where I want more amanos

You just got more amanos! 😂

[nabokovfan87]

On 7/15/2023 at 3:58 AM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

You just got more amanos! 😂

Noooooo! I would have to get them to eat.

Pretty awesome read. ^^

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Can’t you do some Repashy powder or bacter ae? Think powdery foods.

[nabokovfan87]

On 7/15/2023 at 4:01 AM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

Can’t you do some Repashy powder or bacter ae? Think powdery foods.

They have to have live food. It has to basically hit them in the mouth or they starve.

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

On 7/15/2023 at 7:09 AM, nabokovfan87 said:

They have to have live food. It has to basically hit them in the mouth or they starve.

Oh boy..

And bbs can take several days. Too bad you don’t live closer. Little LFS shop near me sells live daphnia cultures and stuff. You could try the Repashy anyway? Who knows? And if they don’t eat it, the neos will eat it. 

On 7/14/2023 at 3:47 PM, nabokovfan87 said:

I will likely end up checking the tank tonight, check for more deaths or stress signs, and then try to leave the salt in there until the normal Wednesday water changes.  What would you do!?

Having more info now about the zoe needs, I would hold off on ANY water changes right now. Unless the neos are showing signs of distress. Also it’s important to add several nerites at this time so they can lay eggs in the brackish water and you can have baby nerites. 😉

Edited July 15, 2023 by Chick-In-Of-TheSea

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Not that I would normally suggest this but can you go to a lake and get some lake water which will have a bunch of microfauna living in it?  It’s certainly a roll the dice type of thing, and you’d need to ensure your source is unpolluted. 

[nabokovfan87]

On 7/15/2023 at 4:22 AM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

Oh boy..

And bbs can take several days. Too bad you don’t live closer. Little LFS shop near me sells live daphnia cultures and stuff. You could try the Repashy anyway? Who knows? And if they don’t eat it, the neos will eat it. 

That's the thing.... Some foods are recommended. I'd have to research it all again. I believe the #1 food was rotifers. They feed on the green water, then the zoes feed on the rotifers and you're able to get good nutrition into them.

It's one of those things.... Get a tank for GW, set that up, then figure out the rotifer culture, which involves saltwater care, and then figure out the maintenance of a tank with these thousands of things in there getting swirled around.

I've never seen fish go after them, but you figure they would. The shrimp just ignore them for now.

On 7/15/2023 at 4:22 AM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

You could try the Repashy anyway? Who knows? And if they don’t eat it, the neos will eat it. 

Yep! That's the plan. I don't think it'll do much of anything, but it's more for the fun of watching them than anything else. I admire them. Something I will breed eventually, but just not this time.

On 7/15/2023 at 4:22 AM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

Also it’s important to add several nerites at this time so they can lay eggs in the brackish water and you can have baby nerites.

🤔

On 7/15/2023 at 4:27 AM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

Not that I would normally suggest this but can you go to a lake and get some lake water which will have a bunch of microfauna living in it?  It’s certainly a roll the dice type of thing, and you’d need to ensure your source is unpolluted. 

Apparently new got radium or some crazy uranium stuff in the water tests here. 😂 Entirely normal and a lot more common than people think, but yeah.... The tank has copepods and has some other critters in there. They are likely going to eat on the zoes more than anything.  It's why I've been so fascinated with all of the cultures that Modified Lung has going on. It's such an interesting skill that I have no idea when I'll have that in my toolbox. One day!

They sell the colonies online like everything else. Just a matter of space and all that. Having things that make it easy to manage.

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

Get this overnighted.

[nabokovfan87]

Gojira molted, right on schedule with the release of her zoes.  All is well in the shrimp tank.

I considered putting all the stuff back in, but there's still the salt in there.  I'll do a normal water change on wednesday and the proceed to rescape everything.  I also am on the fence as to what to do with the culls.  If I give them the "cull tank" setup then it means I can sell them if anything interesting starts to form, like the red rili ones I've been seeing, but it also means that I have to worry about hardness and all that in another tank.  Not quite a major concern, but just a footnote on workload.

I cleaned out the big tank, the future cull tank, and I checked the shrimp tank for molts.  I'm ready to relax now!

As I sat back down with the pups, I had a nature show for them on, there was a scene of this show and it had a wild shrimp.  It was telling the story of this shrimp and what it was doing during the night hours to try to survive.  It was pretty poetic in the way that the behavior of this seemingly random wild prawn was pretty much spot on to what we see in our own shrimp tanks daily!  (for those interested it was the "night on earth" series on netflix and the episode was called Dark Seas) Right after this scene there was a pretty amazing little segment about white sharks in south africa using the light from the city as the city has grown to hunt seals once all of the human traffic has left.  It was some pretty unique, wonderful footage they capturered and for me it was fun to see the sharks do their thing.  I wanted to find a clip of the shrimp segment, couldn't, so instead here's another!

Note.... wild habitat, lots of oxygenation, lots of flow.
 

Just makes me love how amazing shrimp can be.  They are such a fun species to learn about.

Edited July 16, 2023 by nabokovfan87

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

On 7/16/2023 at 4:22 PM, nabokovfan87 said:

water change on wednesday

But what about the zoes??

[nabokovfan87]

On 7/16/2023 at 3:12 PM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

But what about the zoes??

We'll see how they are doing.  I dumped a bunch of powder last night.  Usually they are "around" for 5-10 days.

[nabokovfan87]

One of my "tips and tricks" for people who are new to shrimp is something that I don't see a lot of people doing, if at all.

Look at your shrimp under different color spectrums. It could be blue, green, red, yellow, orange, etc., but the idea here is to easily highlight contrast. I have some shrimp that are blue. Under pink light it's very obvious to tell them apart.

Hopefully this helps someone. It might be a bit of a beginner item, but it's pretty neat how well this works. Same shrimp under a different color, let's see how well it works.

^^ in person I turned the blue on, red to about 10% and the red was a bright red while the blue was enhanced. It worked well! The camera only picked up blue though. 😕

[nabokovfan87]

The salt went in on the 9th and we are now well past the "7 days" I had planned for the soak treatment.  This was the originally specified 1 TBSP per 5 Gallons dose that is often recommended.  Ultimately, this dose works fine and I did lose 2-3 shrimp over the treatment. 

Given the amount of water changes, stress, pulling molts, I am not surprised at this.  Ultimately, I feel safe doing this in future and it's a lot lower dose than I normally would do for the sake of fish treatments.

Today was the second water change of the week.  I did the first one on Monday to gently lower the salt dose, pull 5G and then replaced it.  Today I did another 5G pull and replaced it with normal tap water.  I will probably do one more and then go ahead and add back in the plants.  I feel like they are all going to be mush at this point, but it's difficult to say until we see it. 



By all accounts the colony is doing well and my hope is that the worst of the parasite is dealt with.  I have a lot more information through this experience regarding treatment of the SJ and it's not something where, given the common "tips", that I feel are adequate at all.  We know you need to salt dip to remove them as one method.  The other thing we know is that you need ~14 days for the eggs to hatch for a second treatment.  Following that is another ~14 days of monitoring for signs that you need to start all over again.  So at minimum you're look at a 30 day QT for any new shrimp.

I was doing the cleaning, checking for molts, and I found this female shrimp.  She is by far the best coloration I have and highest quality compared to the shrimp around her and so I had to try to snap a photo!  Please excuse it if the photo doesn't look perfect or is blurry. 



I also had my first cull check on this tank.  These are some of the blue/red Rili genes I am seeing and it results in slow coloration and a weird discoloration in some of the adult shrimp.  I will try to keep an eye on more of these, but I think the female that died recently was the one that had these genes.  Based on what I saw I am due for 2-3 more hatches of shrimp and I did watch one female releasing more baby shrimp today.



I will keep an eye on the tank, one more cull if I need to prior to adding the wood back.  Following that I can do the water change and proceed to get things "settled" again.  I am certain they are looking forward to having the plants back!

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

How are the zoes doing?

[nabokovfan87]

On 7/20/2023 at 6:49 AM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

How are the zoes doing?

Well. It's been "long enough" they didn't have any food and just did their thing. 😕

I love seeing them, I hate seeing them go.

[Chick-In-Of-TheSea]

On 7/20/2023 at 2:35 PM, nabokovfan87 said:

Well. It's been "long enough" they didn't have any food and just did their thing. 😕

I love seeing them, I hate seeing them go.

I mean, I guess we kinda knew that and the brackish water wasn’t sustainable for the rest of the tankmates. They wouldn’t eat the bacter ae?

[nabokovfan87]

On 7/21/2023 at 8:58 AM, Chick-In-Of-TheSea said:

They wouldn’t eat the bacter ae?

No. It's a weird issue where the food basically has to hit them in the face. They can't move until they progress a little.

[nabokovfan87]

A bit late to post, but the tank is back together.

I think the amount of salt in the tank is "fine" and it'll be ok. The ferns are toast, non aquatic apparently, and the moss is a bit out of sorts. The anubias looks a lot better, but I do need to keep an eye on a rhizome or two.

This will be the second time the plants have had any sort of fert recently.  You can see everything is just sort of in place.

This is the loose moss that I usually ball up in a section for them.

And this is basically "the damage" so to speak from the entire treatment window. Just some green algae on the ohko stone.

Ultimately, it feels much better to have a normal setup again. I am going to try to create that second colony, but that tank does have fish inside. Very minimal, but it does have some. I would argue it has less visible hides than this tank does.

I will attempt it when I have some juveniles to move and go from there. The other option is to wait until I have ~10 adults or so. I am not sure which is best. I would assume that the smaller shrimplets can hide in the sußwassertang, but they are also bite size.

I am going to use the warmer temps this time of year and hope that I can really progress the colony size. The goal is to have quality shrimp to sell with stable adults for the fall.

Edited July 23, 2023 by nabokovfan87
repetition

[nabokovfan87]

I cleaned out the tank today.  I did the first deep siphon in what seems like weeks.  I was doing them when I needed to to remove any SJ, but this is just the first one since I have tried to acclimate the tank back to normalcy.  My GH crept up to around 15 degrees somehow.  I also have been a bit less intense when it comes to cleaning the sponge filters.  This isn't out of lack of want to clean them, but just out of a lack of need.  When I do pull them and clean them they aren't dirty.  It is something where I have to keep in mind what the shrimp eat and how the filters themselves behave in this environment. 

I will end up running more tests here shortly, but today was a bigger step towards getting the parameters back to normal. 

I have a new food coming as well.  I want to see if it is easier for the shrimp to digest and break down.  There is common advice that you should feed the shrimp what they can eat in ~2 hours when you do feed them, but what I've been noticing is that the food is so dense and so hard it does not even soak or lose it's shape after 6-10 hours.  This isn't the first time I have experienced this from this brand.  In past I have had pellets that would float and retain their shape for well over 48 hours. I can't say this is the same sort of issue, but the one I have coming is a lot more natural and a lot better ingredients in my opinion. 

I am hoping this helps to clean up some shrimp colors, encourage better nutrition, as well as give the tank a bit easier time when I do feed them.

I have been on the search for more rili patterns, but time will tell. 

I think my plan to start the second colony is to simply replace one of the filters in this tank with a fine foam one from hikari and then go ahead and move one from this tank into the other 29G.  We will see how it works if/when that time comes. 

..... In other news my fish room flashlight exploded on me.  As such that is my main tool I have been using when looking for baby shrimp and it's sorely missed.  It has served me well, but I plan to replace it with one that is a bit more water resistant.

For those that have made it this far, a question if I may.  What varieties of repashy have you fed your shrimp and what do you think makes the "most sense" in terms of a diet for the shrimp.  I can attach a chart, but the thing they did "best with" in some research studies I have are copepods.  I am thinking aufwuchs and plant debris as the main source for my feeding.  I make mine with a bit more water and it's easier for them to break down.