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Your water is pretty soft, so it will take relatively little to move the pH around. I don't know what's in your 'mineral balls' but they might be contributing something that is pushing the pH up. In very soft water pH is inherently unstable and it's generally a waste of time chasing specific...

Cyclops I think Bex. Kind of hard to tell from the photo though! Sent from my HUAWEI GRA-L09 using Tapatalk

Any use as algae eaters Ed? I tried some reasonable size 'river' shrimp as a proxy for Amanos in my tank and the Guianacara demolished them in about a microsecond.

Bloody hell Ed, good work finding anything from SA. I'm jealous. Not worried about them being predatory? Or predated, hah.

Personally I never had an issue with soil/sand going anaerobic. There was often some gas bubbling up from the soil, but as far as I could tell it was always odourless and presumably largely CO2. Haven't tried MTS in a soil tank, I imagine it could get messy.

Yeah I had some double bagged, double poly boxed, well insulated and heat packed fish delivered by 24 hour courrier this week and they were still down from 25 to 18 degrees when they arrived. You really need heat packs this time of year. Sent from my LT30p using Tapatalk

I just use el cheapo generic green water butts from the garden center. They took a week or so of soaking and occasional emptying before the water stopped tasting 'plasticy' but I've been using them for a few months since and no probs. Fish and inverts are all happy and I'm raising cichlid and...

Copper in ferts shouldn't be anything to worry about. I believe Tropica plants have some sort of light/co2 requirement on the label but I'd take them with a pinch of salt. PaH don't tend to look after their plants terribly well so if they're looking past their best you might be better off...

Buying cheap plants from the Far East is an absolute crap shoot if keeping shrimp. Plenty of accounts on here and elsewhere of shrimp wipeouts after receiving plants treated with pyrethroid and neonicotinoid pesticides, the later of which are especially pernicious and hard to remove. Having...

Sorry to hear that. I remember the feeling well, it's not nice at all.

Yes both of those are insect neurotoxins and would explain the shrimp response - permethrine causes nerves to repeatedly fire, hence the sudden erratic movements. http://www.peteducation.com/article.cfm?c=2+2111&aid=598 Unfortunately I'm not sure how long those chemicals are likely to persist...

That would be my bet. Can you check your drops to see what the active ingredients are? A lot of them contain insect neurotoxins such as pyrethrins/pyrethroids which could produce the behavioural effects you observed.

That must be hugely frustrating. If it definitely isn't your water then you're down to real marginal stuff like pesticide on the lettuce or flea treatment on the dog, etc, none of which are going to be readily confirmable.

I think he said it started when trimming before he did a WC Darrel, so hopefully the tap water is OK.

I'm dubious about either trimming stress or planaria as a trigger to be honest. Your description does perfectly match the sort of neurotoxic reaction some of us have had the misfortune of seeing previously but I guess there could be another cause. Get water changing :)

Did you add any new plants? This sounds precisely like the insecticide poisoning that a number of us have experienced when adding plants imported from the far east. http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/warning-shrimp-and-pesticides.19609/#post-198862...

Aha! Cupelopagis vorax or similar - http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=214&sid=633d1b3a7aa8eea09fdf551307043440 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-1583-1_29 Cool wee beastie.

Ah that might be a good shout. Looks a bit Asplancha-ish?

Hi all, Just spotted a new sort of beast amongst the usual microfauna in one of my Paro tanks. Very small - the entire frame here is about 4-5mm across, so it's a quarter to half a mm long at most. Loads of them all over the glass and presumably hardscape. Appear to be largely sessile, with an...

Think it'll take quite a dose to hit leeches. They don't seem to even notice the normal 1ml/50l dosage of the oral solution. Wonder if manual removal might be possible?

Almost certainly either cyclops or ostracods. Neither are anything to worry about and most fish will enjoy eating them. A quick google image search should enable you to determine which it is, or you can tell by the way they move; cyclops dart about with very quick short movements, whilst...

Ah yeah good thoughts on the co2 Iain, not something I have to contend with so didn't cross my mind.

For most species (some are prone to jumping) this only really seems to happen when the fish/shrimp are either distressed or spooked. If something is chasing the shrimp then they can easily leap several inches out of the water to try and escape (I also saw this a lot when dosing with levamisole)...

This article on the matter seems fairly reliable - Shrimp Reproduction .:. An explanation of the reproduction cycle of a Freshwater Aquarium Shrimp

I used 1ml per 50 litres of the 10% oral solution and had no noticeable shrimp casualties, but that was treating both planaria and hydra. Hydra seem much more sensitive to it, so you could probably try a lower dose (Paulo had success with 1ml per 100 litres). Remove any carbon/purigen before hand.

Yeah, either a Samurai sword like Nathan, or Panacur should do the trick, depending on which you can get cheapest.

Clive, I love you to bits for your contributions on this forum, but you're definitely bonkers :lol:

Unless you have some particular aesthetic aversion to them I really wouldn't worry. If you start worrying about snails now you'll be entering a whole world of plant quarantine OCD.

I like snails, they've got cool mouthparts and my shrimp enjoy riding them around the tank.

Can't comment on the meds, but can you not keep the shrimp in a tub until you've finished treatment? I've kept 40 or 50 cherries in a filterless tank at room temperature for about a month before without any noticeable losses.

I do think shrimp keepers are a little over precious sometimes :lol: Having said that, I've only got cheap and bombproof cherries and simoni simoni, and I'm still regularly finding new ways to accidentally slaughter them, so maybe I should shut up!

Hi Ryan. Really sorry to hear that, I;ve been through the same thing myself. There's a very informative thread here from a few months ago where we discussed this in depth - Wipe Out | Page 6 | UK Aquatic Plant Society I would be doing repeated 100% water changes, and running as much...

Yeah I have the odd leech here and there. Don't seem to do much harm but not the most pleasant of sights. Panacur doesn't seem to shift them.

Hi Kristina. Unfortunately your image is only showing as a tiny thumbnail, we'll need to have it a lot bigger to manage any sort of ID I think.

Don't think it's really an exact science - its all guesswork anyway! You could perhaps be a touch conservative and go with half a ml first an see how the shrimp react.

Think I dosed 1ml per 50ltrs actually. Did need two treatments 2 days apart at that dosage though.

Another vote for Panacur. Very effective, no issues with shrimp in my experience. Buy the 10% oral solution for cats and dogs. Bit more expensive than the powder but easier to dissolve and dose.

Don't think that was me Jack, I barely dose anything in my tanks so wouldn't like to comment.

Jack, I can recommend these heaters - http://orinoco-aquatics.co.uk/index.php ... ucts_id=49 Cheap, unobtrusive and keep my 25l cubes at around 22-23 degrees.

I doubt they would have lasted from Tuesday if that stuff was the culprit. I've seen it in action and you're talking minutes or hours til death, not days. Doesn't exclude some other toxins on the plants of course, but it could be something less obvious.

Search for Panacur (its the trade name and can be bought online). Go for the 10% oral suspension and dose 1ml per 50 litres (might need 2 doses a few days apart). Remove any purigen, carbon etc from the fitler before doing so.

Sounds promising - at least you know it's something you can control.

Yup, little red ramshorns. Nice snails, not too voracious - should be fine.

Are there any other shrimp in the tank? How were they acting before they died? If they were thrashing about in obvious distress then it may be a pesticide problem, worth just ruling that out.

I got a few freebies from a LFS a while ago that were cherries with some other genes mixed in, but the guy didn't know what else they'd been bred with. A few of them have developed a dark colouration like this, and some blue accents (and some orange as well). So depending on how sure you are of...

Contact Frothhelmet if you want simoni, that's where I got mine from.

Probably whatever that orange strain of cherries is (I'm fairly crap at shrimp, but pretty sure I remember seeing some somewhere!).

I've successfully nuked both hydra and planaria with Panacur (anti-helmintic wormer) without any apparent loss of fish or shrimp. If possible I would remove them by hand though.

They will eat baby shrimp (as will probably 90% of other fish), and on occasion I've seen mine trying to take eggs from underneath berried females. Healthy cherry colony should be able to withstand a bit of juvenile predation though.

Very pleased that PFK have covered this.

I don't wish to enter into witch hunting here, but I do have to agree with what HWF is saying... I alerted Tony to the issue with his plants nearly a year ago, after which he promised to carry out some tests and do some investigating, but it seems no action was taking until the dirty laundry was...

Thanks George. A couple of comments, having been through this myself... Firstly, whilst Tropica and Aquafleur produce good quality plants without the use of pesticides, I would say that it is always worth being cautious with all plants added to shrimp tanks, as there is always a possibility...

Re: Wipe Out - NAMED! Given the repeated losses of shrimp amongst your customers, do you think it would be worth adding a note about the need for extensive plant quarantine to your website Tony? It would seem that many people are unaware of the dangers involved, and shrimp tanks are very much...

Dincho, I was running cuprisorb, purigen and a poly filter mat when this happened to me the second time and it took weeks for the tank to be shrimp safe again; I'm doubtful that any of those products made much difference but can't be sure one way or the other unfortunately.

A simple rinse is never going to be enough if the plants have been treated with the kind of highly toxic pesticides that I am beginning to suspect are commonly used by growers in the far east. I have read enough of these exact same stories to think that many resellers of far eastern plants must...

Feel for you dude, I've had this happen to me twice after adding plants imported from the far east. Took a month of running every chelating and absorbing agent I could find to get the tank shrimp safe again. Darrel's advice sounds very good though, I'd run with that.

Amanos require brackish conditions for the offspring to survive, so I shouldn't think you'd be running any risk of crossbreeding, even if they were able to produce viable offspring.

Well, doesn't sound like copper poisoning. Hows your water quality?

Hikarui algae wafers and squashed pond snails seem to get mine going.

Sounds like they're OK to me, as long as their little arms are shovelling away at something I wouldn't worry.

Heh, OK. Failling any better advice, I'd probably try removing the plec for a while and see if it makes a difference.

OK, this is probably going to sound stupid but - how many have you got? If its very few then there's always the chance they might all be male! :p

Re: Ouch. Must've been a bit hungrier than mine :lol:

Only have experience with agassizi, but they'll probably chomp on any baby cherries they find, but should ignore the adults.

Aye I'm sure cherries will be fine, just thought there might be something smaller. I've had my PhD head on today and was idly thinking smaller might mean more shrimp/faster life cycle/longer period of 'eatability', all of which = more food. I should get out more :p

Seeing as this thread is active I figured I'd pop this question in here... are there any shrimp people can recommend that are smaller than cherries but just as prolific? I'm after shrimp where the juveniles can act as a partial food source in a semi-sustainable micropredator setup, so need them...

I wouldn't be too keen on being overrun with hydra. Theyre basically a type of jellyfish that never progresses to the adult life stage, and they'll apparantly predate juvenile fish/shrimp. This is going off internet wisdom, I've never had them myself.