Fresh spring water, ghost shrimp dying

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lupinedusk

Aquarium Advice Apprentice
Joined
Aug 27, 2017
Messages
11
Hi. I'm hoping someone has an idea what could be happening here..I have a 10gal aquarium that I put bottled spring water in, along with a pennywort and some hornwort. It's aerated and has light. The only animals in it were about 8 small ghost shrimp and I put food in for them since there was no accumulation of anything for them to eat. The first night, 3 died, the following day, atleast 2 more. I can't see the remaining ones anywhere.
 
Yes. And acclimated them by leaving their bag floating in the tank for about an hour. Also, looks like I still have a few live ones this morning. Little buggers are hard to see. I actually did it this way because I read something about using ghost shrimp to get a tank ready for other fish....looked it up last night, and they were talking about dead shrimp to add ammonia. I've never bothered to cycle a tank before though and never had any problems (had never heard of cycling)
 
It could the the shrimp. Often sold as feeders, sometimes their care prior to selling might be subpar since they only need to be alive long enough to be consumed.
The water conditions that they were in versus the spring water could be vastly different. For acclimation, I usually place the new fish/shrimp in a bucket and drip tank water in at a slow rate (for an hour or two). It allows the new inhabitants to slowly adjust to the tank water.
Unless your source/tap water is horrible, I would use that over spring water.
 
My tap water is extremely bad... Thanks, I will try the slow drip with the next batch. And maybe get them somewhere else.
 
Sorry to hear about the tap water. Serious shrimpers use a combination of RODI plus a remineralizer. Adjust it to a particular TDS range.
I'm not one of those. My tap is fine for my fish and shrimp. I have a couple of neocardina shrimp tanks (red cherries, yellows).
An inexpensive TDS meter and pH/GH/KH test kits would be handy to have. It will tell you things about your source water (spring, tap) and your tank water and how stable you maintain those parameters.
 
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