Am I doing something wrong?

[Yarny1]

Hey...so I started cycling a new 8.5 gallon tank just before the lockdown in March. I did fishless cycling and it was all ready to go by Mother's day. A local place does curbside pick up so I got 3 shrimp and a snail. Two shrimp died the in the first 48 hours. The second one in a week. The snail lasted a month and just died. I was feeding them pellets for shrimp but they weren't too interested. All the water parameters have been great and I've been doing 25% weekly water changes? Was this just a case of bad luck or should I be doing something differently?

 

[fishwonder]

What are your water parameters exactly?

 

[Yarny1]

Zero ammonia. Trace amounts of nitrites and nitrates. Water is a little on the hard side. Ph is 7.5. Zero phosphate.

 

[Enchantress]

Nitrites should be 0 as well...shrimp in particular are quite sensitive to it. The only parameter that's allowed to go above 0 is nitrates.

What kind of shrimp/snails were they and how did you acclimate them? And what's the temperature in the tank?

It's a long shot, but are you sure there isn't anything in or near the tank that could've caused some kind of poisoning unrelated to water quality? Copper in particular comes to mind when invertebrates are dying. Any chemicals, paints, metal objects that might have come in contact with the water?