Hello again!
So I have a 60L rainwater tank, which has some fish (a few otos, kuhli loaches and finally some sparkling gouramis) and shrimps in it, with a pH of 7.2, and test results at 0/0/0, I change 40% water a week, no CO2.
At first it had 15 locally-bred red cherry shrimp, but I've noticed that they have slowly disappeared over the past 2-3 months. The cherries they hid a lot (even when they were alone in the tank) so even though I had about 15 I'd only see a few a day, and now I haven't seen any in a few weeks. About a month ago I also bought some Amano shrimps (I still had cherries then), which molted fine at first so I thought were ok, but in the past 2 weeks 3 had died. I thought my water is too soft (it has a pH of 6.6 straight form the waterbutt), so I added some cuttlefish bone and some oyster shell grit when the first one died, but they've continued to die. For almost all the cherries I've never found bodies (I think maybe the Kuhlis could have eaten them?), with the amanos I do find bodies with the white ring of death on most of them. I have 4 left.
So I've bought myself a new tank just for them on my desk, a 30cm cube (couldn't fit a bigger one in my flat). It's going to be good old-fashioned London tap water, and with my remaining amanos, some nice cherries and a few snails. As my amanos are already dying, I think I want to put them in almost immediately, as they'll die anyway in my current tank. If I did water changes every day for 3 - 4 weeks, then tapered off to every other day, and planted very heavily from the start, do you think I could get away with this? I just want them to not die. I won't add any other livestock for at least 6 weeks (usually I would wait 6 weeks to add anything, doing this currently with another rainwater tank). I think I could wait 2 days to plop them in, but it seems like every day counts! I was going to put it all together this weekend.
Has anyone done this, and do you have any advice?
So I have a 60L rainwater tank, which has some fish (a few otos, kuhli loaches and finally some sparkling gouramis) and shrimps in it, with a pH of 7.2, and test results at 0/0/0, I change 40% water a week, no CO2.
At first it had 15 locally-bred red cherry shrimp, but I've noticed that they have slowly disappeared over the past 2-3 months. The cherries they hid a lot (even when they were alone in the tank) so even though I had about 15 I'd only see a few a day, and now I haven't seen any in a few weeks. About a month ago I also bought some Amano shrimps (I still had cherries then), which molted fine at first so I thought were ok, but in the past 2 weeks 3 had died. I thought my water is too soft (it has a pH of 6.6 straight form the waterbutt), so I added some cuttlefish bone and some oyster shell grit when the first one died, but they've continued to die. For almost all the cherries I've never found bodies (I think maybe the Kuhlis could have eaten them?), with the amanos I do find bodies with the white ring of death on most of them. I have 4 left.
So I've bought myself a new tank just for them on my desk, a 30cm cube (couldn't fit a bigger one in my flat). It's going to be good old-fashioned London tap water, and with my remaining amanos, some nice cherries and a few snails. As my amanos are already dying, I think I want to put them in almost immediately, as they'll die anyway in my current tank. If I did water changes every day for 3 - 4 weeks, then tapered off to every other day, and planted very heavily from the start, do you think I could get away with this? I just want them to not die. I won't add any other livestock for at least 6 weeks (usually I would wait 6 weeks to add anything, doing this currently with another rainwater tank). I think I could wait 2 days to plop them in, but it seems like every day counts! I was going to put it all together this weekend.
Has anyone done this, and do you have any advice?