shrimp keep dying.

[lachupacabra]

for a while now i have had a 5.5 gallon fish tank with RCS and fish. I had bought some from houstonfishfanatic giving me a total of ~18. A couple months later they all started getting a milky color in their abdomens. Then they all started dying one by one. I had tigers in here too but they got the disease as well and all died. I'm left with at least 4 RCS. I want to get more in hopes that they will breed and i can populate my bigger tanks with them but first i want to understand why they all died and how to prevent it. especially because i noticed one like that today.

tank specs at the time:
5.5 gallons
weekly 50% water changes
ph: 7.4
seachem ferts line
DIY co2
10 gallon HOB filter w/ prefilter
temp: 78
pretty densely planted w/ live plants.
fauna: 1 platy, 1 oto, 2 cpd, 8 green neons.


This is what they looked like



I got this from this website here

. Color loss, orange and white coloring of the entire back and abdomen (not in the head area) in connection with daily occasional death cases.

Internal infections caused by different bacteria, lacking aquarium hygiene, too little water changes, stress, too many animals in one basin

^ that sounds like what i had but i'm not sure. Could it have been the abundance of fauna that stressed the shrimp out causing them to die off like that.
i asked on the planted tank and they said it could have been my DIY CO2 poisoning them at night, and that might be it too since i did not have good surface agitation. or maybe the copper in the seachem flourish, but thats only like 3%, could it really hurt that much? I dont know :(

sorry for the long post but i really want to know what i did wrong.

[eklikewhoa]

Re: shrimp keep dying.

If you are doing 50% wc then the flourish isn't gonna harm them.

I would look into poor water quality or over gassing during lights out. You have the co2 along with plants using up o2 that they need.

What are you feeding them?

Ever test or check co2?

What's the water source?

[nacra99]

Re: shrimp keep dying.

How are you regulating the CO2?
for such a small setup as a 5.5 gal, a little bit of co2 goes a long way.
Adding to that DIY units are usually unpredictable in spitting out CO2, you might be over gassing them or you may be having pH swings due to non-constant CO2 production.

I would pull the CO2 for a little while and see if it helps.

[lachupacabra]

Re: shrimp keep dying.

Oh this was a while back, not recently but i want to figure out the source of death.
I did take out the co2 and less shrimp died and it eventually came to a stop. but yesterday i noticed a shrimp that was whitish in the abdomen and i dont have co2 in the tank anymore. my water comes straight from the tap w/ dechlorinator. Thing is i never had this problem till maybe october and i had these shrimp long before that. They eat the leftover flakes that the fish dont manage to eat, and i have a prefilter on the HOB so they eat the biofilm from that. i think i might have poisoned them, that seems to be the only possible answer like you guys said.

[thief]

Re: shrimp keep dying.

Hmm I doubt that it is internal infections.  Sounds like your tap water is slowly killing them because there is to much copper possibly.  I would test your tank water at your LFS.  They usually do test for free.

Also is could be a Nitrite problem?  Just try and test for NH4, NO3, NO2, and copper.  Then go from there!