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Acclimating Peppermint Shrimp


lutz123

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What's your tried and true method?  I have terrible luck with peppermint shrimp dying in acclimation or very shortly after.  I've tried slow drip acclimation and also floating an open bag - dump a majority of the water and add tank water every 15 minutes or so.  The only other type of shrimp I have are skunk cleaners and those acclimated easily.

 

How do you balance taking the time to do it right with the stress caused by the acclimation taking so long?

 

 

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boil water....pinch of salt....wait thats not pepermint shrimp.

 

try floating them in teh sump or somewhere not blasted by light....shouldnt be a time issue slower is better for most crustacians.

main thing is to go slow especially if the saltwater they came from is at a lower salinity..

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I've tried anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hrs.  It even usually has it's little square of mesh security blanket to hang onto.  For what it's worth, the skunk cleaners I got before were giant monsters, and the 5 sexy shrimp (different tank) acclimated easily - and I was fairly quick (30-45 min) with all of those.  The peppermints are usually pretty small.  Does size/age make a difference? 

Edited by lutz123
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Allot of the time, with a slow Drip.... The Containers become diff' temps. So if you just Pour it in, after 2 hours of a slow drip.. I'm sure There is a temp. diference there... so. Maybe a SlowDrip... Then Float, then maybe mix some water, float more, then Good to Go..... That'd be the Extra Careful way. lol

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I buy them 24 to a bag sometimes and the bag is often cold. I pour the water and the shrimp into a 5g bucket and then add a cup of tank water till the original amount of water is doubled. This usually takes me 15 minutes. 

Out of 400 some odd shrimp, I've only lost a dozen.

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For most all inverts like this, I float the bag in my frag tank, clamping it to the side of the tank with the mouth open. I'll remove some of the water so that maybe a cup remains in the bag. I then hang a tube off with an airline valve of an aqualifter and drip a couple of drips per second into the bag. Every once in a while, I go back and, using a turkey baster, discard some of the bag water into a beaker. I do this until the salinity matches and I'm comfortable that I've removed at least three times the bag's original volume (e.g. about 3 cups). Then, using a 3-inch PVC tube opened up near the bottom of the tank, I'll pour them in letting them go near the bottom. This gives them a clear path to cover without getting hassled by the fish on the way down.

 

Keep in mind that some cleaner shrimp (for example, the coral banded shrimp) won't tolerate shrimp of other species and may kill them.

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Guess I need to just keep trying. This time it seemed more like shock, though I didn't feel like I did anything out of the ordinary. It was very still shortly after opening the bag and never really recovered.

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Guess I need to just keep trying. This time it seemed more like shock, though I didn't feel like I did anything out of the ordinary. It was very still shortly after opening the bag and never really recovered.

Did you get them local or were they shipped in? If shipped in, it's possible that there was a problem with ammonia toxicity. Ammonia is less toxic at low pH than at high pH. In a shipping situation, detritus can spoil releasing ammonia, but at the same time respiration can lower the pH during shipment. Then, when you open the bag and let fresh air in, the pH of the water can rise and the ammonia can become more toxic if acclimation is too slow. In these situations, I toss a little Amquel or some other ammonia binder in at the start.

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i've stop acclimating inverts and corals.  float bag for 10-15 minutes, open bag, scoop them out and straight into the tank, have not lost any, bought 5 just last week and they all seems fine.

Edited by hlem
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I used to drip everything until I read this from John at Reefcleaners:

 

1. Float the bag in your tank to get the animals used to the temperature in your aquarium.

2. Wait 15 minutes.

3. Add animals to the tank, discard shipping water and any towels used in the packaging.

4. DO NOT DRIP ACCLIMATE.

He goes on for several paragraphs here:

 

http://www.reefcleaners.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=17&Itemid=67

 

Since then I've only bought snails and one cleaner shrimp, acclimated them as above, no problems....

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This guy is saying do NOT drip acclimate inverts? I can't agree with this.

Reefcleaners ships a lot of their snails, crabs and such in very little water. You have to read the rest to understand why they make this recommendation FOR THEIR PRODUCT.

 

Important: Snails may go through shock during shipping, and be closed when they arrive. You should give them plenty of time to come out of their shells and move around before deciding they didn't make the trip. Snails may go dormant for up to 3 days.

You may find this to be different than the acclimation procedure you are used to carrying out. The reason we ask our customers to use this procedure is because our snails and crabs live intertidally, and can handle swings in ph/salinity without a problem. However, what they can't handle is toxic levels of ammonia. During the shipping process, ammonia levels in the shipping bags build, while the ph level goes down. As the ph goes down the toxicity of ammonia also goes down. However, when your tank water with normal ph is introduced to the shipping bags, and the ph rises, so does the toxicity of the ammonia, and you will be poisoning the livestock. Please don't do this and certainly never let livestock sit out in buckets with shipping water exposed to fresh air for a long period of time, we know of no surer way to kill your new arrivals. Any other method of acclimation voids the Alive Arrival Guarantee. It is an easy method of acclimation and it works fine, please follow it.

 

So, their reason behind it is the one that I mentioned above - ammonia toxicity at elevated pH that comes from exposure to fresh air. Many shelled inverts don't have resources to adjust to wide salinity swings quickly, so matching salinity is an important step.

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You'll be happy to know that I have a new peppermint shrimp that has now made it to the 18 hour mark!  He ate all 4 small aiptasia within 2 hours of being in the tank!  Yay - will definitely get BRK peppermints again!  One of the skunk cleaners is not happy with sharing his/her rock and was giving chase - literally stalking it.  The peppermint stays under the rock and hopefully will be smart enough to stay put.  Now that it's done it's job I will probably move him out if I can catch it and put it in what will be the seahorse tank.

 

For what it's worth, the specific gravity at BRK for the inverts was 1.020.  I made an assumption last time that it was probably closer to 1.023 before, so I took things much slower this time and it did fine.  My tank was at a hair under 1.025.  I hated to adjust that much in the span of 2.5 hours.  Is there any other choice in that circumstance?

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