Drip Acclimating Cleaner Shrimp

[sk187]

So I bought a cleaner shrimp and drip acclimated it for about 1 - 1.5 hours in my sump draining half of the water in it when it doubled twice. After that I put it into a container and then added some water every 5 mins or so until the container was full, drain half of and repeated. I finally introduced the shrimp and then I woke up this morning to see it dead -_-;

I think I need to drip acclimate it even longer? Say like 4-6 hours since the salinity of the LFS is 1.018 or something pretty low while my DT is at 1.025. Thoughts? 

 

 

[Happyfeet]

Hour to an hour and a half should have been enough time... though that is a pretty large bump in specific gravity. Did you measure the specific gravity after your acclimated to see where it was prior to placing the shrimp in the tank?

 

Was the container in the sump in the water? biggest problem when drip acclimating is the temp change. I acclimate for a shorter amount of time because I've found the temp change to be much worse than the slight chemical changes in each tank. Dripping over an 1 and a half could have caused the temp in the container to drop significantly. 

 

Shrimp when they are stressed, like to molt, is it possible all you are seeing is the shed carapace and not the actual shrimp?

 

[L8 2 RISE]

Are you sure you found the dead shrimp and not a shedding?  They often shed after being introduced to a new environment.

 

Typically 1-1.5 hrs is more than enough.  Also, temp is most important for inverts, but it sounds like you had that covered by using the sump.

 

.......Should have read Happyfeets post before typing this, but I agree with him.

[rtelles]

Depending on the size of your tank, I'd wait a day or two and see if the little guy emerges. When I got my first cleaner shrimp I was distraught the next morning when I woke up to what looked like a fully formed, fully dead cleaner shrimp. I was more than pleasantly surprised when I saw him happily stealing food from my fish a few days later. Aside from being a slightly lighter color, their molted exoskeletons can look exactly like their living bodies, and they immediately go into hiding after molting. If he is dead, I'd agree with everyone else that the drip acclimation is less important than the temperature acclimation, which, like many others, I learned the hard way.

[YHSublime]

1.5 hours seems a lot to me. I would buy from a place that matched my specific gravity and toss it in.

[sk187]

I did it in my sump so I don't think it was the temperature that killed it. I should have checked the SG with my refractor -_-; that would have been smart. But yea it wasn't the exoskeleton. I raise fresh water shrimp so I am pretty familiar with the whole molting process. Essentially the shrimp in the tank had started to disintegrate.

[s2nhle]

Years back, I bought two cleaner shrimps at the same time and was put in one bag. I acclimated them for about 45 min. next morning, one survive and one dead. So it is depend on the condition of the shrimp when you bought them.

[sk187]

So you guys aren't going to believe this and I feel so noob haha. My refractor is in Brix and I was using to measure salinity. I use to use it for brewing and it didn't occur to me (but it should have) that the refraction rate for sugar and salt would be different. My brix for my tank is 6.2 instead of 4.0 as 6.2 is 1.0245 for a sugar aqueous solution but not for salt.... 

Glad I figured this out before I tried to introduce anything else. Interestingly enough, the clownfish handled that increased salinity like a champ.

[smallreef]

I've had issues and ended up with fairly high salinity... Just drop it very slowly

And personally, I temp acclimate the bag (float) of whatever (fish or inverts) I buy, add 50% to volume off bag of my tank water after 10 minutes of floating, let sit another 5 minutes and then net out and into the tank (I don't want other people's water in my tank) I've not had to many issues doing it this way for the last 10 years...

I've had more problems drop acclimating...

[wildcrazyjoker81]

I do the same thing as small reef. Float, add 40-50% volume and either net or hand scoop into tank. Dripping is too tedious and I am too lazy to do it properly

[Reefer_Madness]

I do the same thing as small reef. Float, add 40-50% volume and either net or hand scoop into tank. Dripping is too tedious and I am too lazy to do it properly

I actually did the same thing on a cleaner shrimp this last weekend. Both are still alive and kick'n