u/Fearless_Mind4003

Yesterday I have finally found my first 3 eggnant shrimps since starting my first tank (I had one shrimp that was already eggnant when I got my first batch, but that doesn't count and her babies are all big now)!

Sadly one of them was already in the process of dropping them when I found out. I think this one is a first time mom and I heard it's common for them to drop them.

Shortly after I found the dropped eggs (pic 2), but couldn't find the mom anymore. Today I saw her again and was surprised to see a few still attached. I think there are like 4 or so left.

Is it normal for shrimp to keep some eggs after dropping most of them? Does that mean she will try to hatch the remaining ones?

Help! My snails are slowly dying one after the other and I don't know why.

This is my first tank and it has been going since the beginning of march this year. Around 1 1/2 - 2 weeks into cycling I added 4 blue ramshorn snails which have been doing great and breeding well until recently.

They share the tank with a bunch of neocaridina, 6 kuhli loaches and I also added a shoal of espei rasbora a few days ago.

Around middle of april I started having issue with one of the 4 starting snails. It was doing normal the other day and the next day I would see it just laying on the side not really doing anything. It was barely moving, struggling to get a hold of the substrate and not eating anything.

When moving the snail to a smooth surface like the glass or some driftwood it was be able to stick to it and and move around, although slowly. However sooner or later it would always fall off somehow and just lay there on the side again wherever it fell and not be able to get up.

It took almost a week since the snail stopping moving and eating and me trying to help to get it up again until it finally passed away.

Since it was one of my 4 starting snails and one of the 2 biggest ones at that and I don't know how old they were when I got them from the LFS I kinda figured it may just have been old age.

Around a week after I lost the first snail my other oldest snail started showing the same symptoms. Ok, maybe also old age since they were around the same size.

I still did ask about it in a post since I thought it was kinda odd and wanted to make sure if I was doing something wrong.

I was advised to add some cuttlefish bone pieces which I did in case it was calcium related. The snail still ended up passing away just like the other, but maybe it was just too late already for this one.

Fast forward to today and now I have 2 other snails showing the same symptoms. I definitely know now that it is not old age as one of the snails is a pink offspring of my original 4 snails. So it is no older than around 1 - 1/2 months and probably from one of the first clutches of eggs.

As of now, whatever it is that is wrong with my snails, it has only affected the larger individuals in my tank. I have not seen any of the very small ones like this.

I have been having some PH and KH issues lately that I am trying to resolve. I have ordered crushed corals now that should arrive tomorrow in the hopes to raise and stabilze it.

Though the first death already happened before I was having issues with that.

I have tested water parameters today:

Ph 6.5 - 7.0

KH 3

I know that this is aleady too low for the snails. Originally they were both higher with PH at 7.5 and KH at 5 - 6.

I started adding KH+/GH+ now with each water change and top up. However, after a few days it is always low again (tested 4 days ago after adding the mineralizer and it showed KH 5 and GH 8, so it went in 4 days from KH 5 to 3 and also dropped GH from 8 to 7).

Temp. 24,3 Celsius

Gh 7

NH4 <0.05

NO2 0.025 - 0.05

NO3 3

I use tap water that I dechlorinize.

Can anyone confirm if this is clado?

I noticed one of my ramshorn snails has this white stripe across its shell. It goes all around the shell.

I am not sure if it suddenly appeared of of it had it all along as there is quite a number of ramshorn snail in my tank and I may just not have noticed it.

Is this snail alright? What could have caused this white stripe? As far as I know it is the only one that has it.

Sorry, if the quality of the pic isn't great, I saw it when the tank lights were already off.