Mystery disease - caridina mariae

[OllieTY]

Hi folks,

I've just returned from a few days holiday and noticed these strange red spots forming on one of my shrimp. Any ideas on diagnosis/remedy? There's a small one on her left side, and a much more prominent one on her right side in the gill area

 

[Hufsa]

Rust disease

 

[G H Nelson]

Rust disease

Very interesting!

 

[OllieTY]

Uh oh.

Well, I guess I'll try a Peroxide dose and then monitor the tank to see if this is spreading. I have already quarantined that shrimp but sounds like maybe that might be too far along!

 

[MichaelJ]

Hi @OllieTY what sort of water are you keeping them in (GH, pH, TDS wise) and what are you feeding them? Rust disease is often stress induced from suboptimal water. Changing the water parameters probably wont cure it when it first happen, but might help prevent it happening in the first place.

Cheers,
Michael

 

[OllieTY]

I've never tested for any of those, they're just in my dechlorinated tap water. Im up from 5 to a small colony of about 15 over the last 12 months, so I'm really hoping this isnt the start of a decline. I might up the water changes to twice a week and see how the rest get on. The shrimp in question definitely was too far along, I noticed that they had died overnight....

 

[X3NiTH]

Rust disease

Interesting indeed, so the main culprits here are the Gram Negative bacteria and the suggested treatment using H2O2 is not overly successful. I had a quick look to see if there’s a way to improve the success of treatment with H2O2 and came across this very interesting paper.

Killing and Lysis of Gram-negative Bacteria Through the Synergistic Effect of Hydrogen Peroxide, Ascorbic Acid, and Lysozyme​

I dare to say that this method could be implemented to increase success of treatment. I have no idea of how safe this combination is on Fauna within a tank as I haven’t personally experimented with this but there is nothing overtly toxic about this combination other than the concentration of H2O2 used (paper used 30%, we’d typically be using 3% so care would need to be taken in recalculation to ensure dosing safe amounts of H2O2). I’d definitely consider some experimentation to begin with, firstly on some Daphnia to get an insight into the combinatorial properties of this method and it’s safety.

🙂

 

[xZaiox]

Im up from 5 to a small colony of about 15 over the last 12 months, so I'm really hoping this isnt the start of a decline.

How big is the tank? Are they fed regularly? I would typically expect way more than an increase of just 10 shrimp over 12 months. Maybe I'm just used to cherry shrimp... those guys breed like rabbits. I would definitely advise testing the water parameters as @MichaelJ has suggested. If they aren't breeding very much, it may indicate unfavourable parameters.

 

[palcente]

This killed all of my 60+ amano shrimps - they did not breed at all while it happened. Having gone through this, I highly recommend you take out and euthanize every single one that you see is infected. Then monitor and pick out any other that start to show symptoms after some time. Otherwise they will just eat each other shells or each other corpses and get sick like that. Sorry for your loss.

I have no idea what was the cause of the outbreak in my tank. Cherry shrimps survived (I have not seen any dead or with patches), but have not seen any berried either. So they may be on the way out...

Matt

 

[OllieTY]

I am being very cautious now. I am manually removing all old shells that I can see and i've increased my water change frequency to try and catch this. I have also noticed that my other female shrimp havent been berried in a few weeks, I've increased targeted and overall feeding slightly too...