The water cleared up. I ordered Matten filters for the 20 and the 10 gallons. Changed the rock with moss in the 20, and slowly started adding plants that were properly treated for insects and parasites this time. The fish left in the 36 were moved to the 10 gallon to help cycle it and I tore the whole 36g down. Cleaned the gravel and more hiking for pretty lava rocks.
Where we live is full of old lava flows and some of the rocks were really neat. There's collapsed lava tubes that make mini caves.
The couple Petco Cherry Shrimp got moved to the 20 gallon once the water parameters were correct and the tanks were finished cycling.
And then Scott told me to order my shrimps already. I'd been compulsively obsessing over these little critters for months and pouring over you tube videos, joining groups for shrimp on face book, order the damned shrimp!! lol.
Reds and blacks in the 20 long, blue jelly and blue dreams in the 10 gallon.
Only I made a terrible mistake. Some one messaged me when I started inquiring about who had neos for sale and how much. I didn't know anything about imported versus home bred shrimp. This seemed like a hell of a deal and I ordered so many shrimp. But they started dying off one or two here, and three the next month, one more the next week. They were breeding and having babies, but I never saw any of them really living to adult shrimp. I kept testing my water (with strips, another mistake).
I joined a few more Facebook groups, this time with auctions. I won a few for random skittles, and got a few yellow and orange. I didn't even know I liked these colors until I separated them out into the 5.5g and they looked amazing against the black substrate. I won another couple auctions for only yellows and orange rili. I was having babies and I loved them. I took so many pictures I had to start deleting them off my phone after I loaded them on my computer.
I was waiting patiently for the population explosion I kept readying about other people having. "I started with 10 three months ago, and now I have 100's of babies!!" I know the auctions I was winning were for young shrimp, but either mine weren't breeding or the babies never made it. I was getting very discouraged. I did more research. The test strips were crap! I had no idea I needed to test of GH and KH, I had no idea what my PH was except for the highest color on the test strip. I'm on well water and thought I was so lucky not to have to worry about having to treat my tap water. I was so wrong.
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