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A dedicated forum and online store for the Opae ula shrimp! 

Having issues with your tank or inhabitants? Need to know what equipment to use or have other questions? Post here!
 #10650  by fenriver
 
I'm very new to building aquariums and this is my first, so I'm not sure where I went wrong. I'm using a 3.3L glass jar that has been cycling for about a month with sand and volcanic rocks. The opae ula are in another small jar which were gifted to me 1+ years ago, but I decided to try to move them to a bigger tank as they decreased from 10 to 6 in the 1-2 years I've owned them.

I did have chaetomorpha in the tank, but it was in a pretty sorry state because I stored it in distilled water temporarily for a day because the hobbyist I bought it from said that freshwater was ok temporarily. (oops) It unfortunately turned whiter in the tank except for a few tiny green pieces after a week or two, so I removed it the best I could before it polluted the tank too badly.

The MTS went in about a week ago (taken from the old jar, it already had a white tip on its shell but I'm not sure if it was this extensive) and seemed mostly fine as it was active during the night eating the leftover dying chaeto and buried in the sand during the day. I found it sideways and drooping out of the shell one night but it was completely fine the next morning so I assumed it was fine. There are even tiny snails in the tank now.
However, I found it sideways again today. (not sure if it's drooping but the antennas sometimes wave around)

Could there be something slowly killing the snail? The salinity was ~1.015SG initially, but I haven't measured it recently. Also, should I go pick up some test kits in case there's something wrong with the sand or rocks I purchased? They're quite pricey so I will have to save up quite a bit but I guess I have plenty of time since zero algae has grown yet lol //cloud.tapatalk.com/s/65ba5fbb6af ... 225607.mp4
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Last edited by fenriver on 31 Jan 2024 15:16, edited 3 times in total.
 #10656  by fenriver
 
Update:

The snail and all the babies are still alive! I guess it really is difficult to kill MTS lol

The tank only recently started growing small patches of diatoms after 3 months but still no signs of algae. Should I feed the tank more to add more nutrients or leave it be?

I tested using the Salifert ammonia test and it showed 0.25ppm ammonia before the diatoms showed up.