I am about to quit the hobby

[david052856]

I use fertilizers. I use liquid CO2, and also liquid nitrogen for plants. But I only dose in half doses.

 

[spencerguy1]

What do you feed them? Could they have gotten a bad batch of food?

Honestly, not seeing the bodies doesn't convince me that something is eating them. That is why I'm asking you all of these questions, to see if there is some kind of pattern or something that stands out.

Think about how shrimp are smaller than most fish fry, and yet fry die in breeding tanks all the time and "disappear" because they are a very small mass. We don't find their tiny skeletons or anything, yet in some cases their numbers dwindle steadily...and not usually because something is eating them.

I had 7 cardinals healthy for several months. One day there were 4, then none.
They're fussy little guys, and that's all there is to it. When a shrimp dies, it'll get eaten by other shrimp very quickly. You generally won't see bodies.
Keep on trucking with your other shrimp, and don't try the Cardinals again unless you want to try a whole new set-up and spend a lot of money.
I'm going to try again someday, but not soon.

i had 1 ghost shrimp in my tank before i got my bushfish. never saw it again after a month. shrimp are scavengers, like happypoet said, and will eat mostly anything, including corpses. probably the bodies were eaten. or, like in my situation, it probably died and was too small to see, like platytudes said. even ghost shrimp have a big orange spot on there back that makes them relatively visible. but when fish or invertibrates die, they tend to pale out and lose color. especially shrimp. they usually turn pale white after death and then turn transperent. your probably just cant see the bodys, or maybe the bodies have been eaten. i doubt anythings eating them.

 

[captmicha]

I use fertilizers. I use liquid CO2, and also liquid nitrogen for plants. But I only dose in half doses.

That's not really helpful. What fertilizer do you use?? Even a half dose of what you may be using might contain a really high amount of something that's not great for inverts.

 

[david052856]

I use the Flourish brand for nitrogen and CO2 and then I use FloraPride for the Potash and Chiclated Iron.

 

[pbmax]

Neocaridina (RCS, Yellows, Snowballs, Blue Pearls) can handle every fertilizer I've thrown at them (Flourish comp, excel, nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus), in recommended dosages of course. It seems unlikely that fertilizers are at fault, at least with the RCS.

 

[happypoet]

Personally, I'd keep that water as empty as possible with those Cardinals. I read about some people who even used DISTILLED with their Sulawesi species.

 

[pbmax]

Totally. Cardinals scare me... I can't even keep CRS alive

 

[david052856]

Well so far my Cardinals are doing good. No loses yet. They are the captive raised and juv.

 

[plantedtank12]

I agree with happy poet, shrimp are very good at eating dead things, and cardinals are one of the hardest to keep shrimp in the hobby. Platytudes has a point, they might have just gotten a bad batch of food.

 

[plantedtank12]

All sulawesi species are picky, you must have precise water conditions.