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C. japonica and KCl update



Several months ago, I inquired about the effect of potassium chloride on C.
japonica shrimp as a possible cause of their deaths. I was dosing potassium
chloride and every shrimp that I added before died in less than a week. I
had a couple of e-mail discussions with people that had clear evidence that
KCl kills the shrimp and with people that said it couldn't possibly be
harmful.

Well, now that I have swiched my potassium source to K2SO4, I bought a new
batch of shrimp last week. I decided to buy only 6 to see if they would
survive. Well, I'm happy to say that a week later I spotted 3 of them at the
same time. But a couple of days after I introduced them, I did find one
dead. They almost never come out in the open during the day, so it's
difficult to spot them to see exactly how many are alive. But when I do see
them, they don't behave like they did on the previous occasions. They would
huddle together in the corner of the tank under the dwarf Sags and never
come out. Then their bodies began to turn white shortly before they died.
Now they still hide, but not all together and in different locations, and
don't look very stressed.

So while I can't say that KCl definitely kills Amano shrimp under any
circumstances, it sure seems like it from other people's and my own
experiences. I'm going to stay with K2SO4 whether it's true or not. One
thing I also did was add a few drops of a reef iodide supplement, but it
seems that the absense of iodine would not cause all the shrimp to die
suddenly.
___
Alex R
pcalex at hotpop_com