moltings, leave them in or not

I leave mine in to be resorbed back to what it came from. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust sort of thing. It hasn't hurt anything, maybe even helped who knows.

 

ok, well from now on they will stay in then, I am getting 4 nassarius snails this weekend so they will pick at them a little, and maybe the shrimp I want to get...totter0817, not sure what you have going on there, are they small hermits, I have some small blue legs that are doing fine, and i also have a much larger electric blue, maybe try a larger hermit if you have small ones, mine seem pretty hardy though, as soon as I aclimated them and put them in they were busy working and havent stopped since. if your cleaner hadnt molted fine I would geuss they were dieng cause of not being able to molt correctly but that doesnt seem to be the case.

 

they will only dissolve into calcium, which i think is what us people with corals want

 

I leave mine in....JMO

 

Agreed with most above I have three Skunk cleaner shrimp and it seems like I've got at least one molting a week, decided to leave it in and so far so good. And the calcium theory def makes sense to me.

 

IMO, your shrimp are molting too often. Are you adding iodine to your system?

 

Somewhere in the back of my head, I thought about Iodine. I didn't say it, for fear of being wrong about it. I notice when I used to add it(lfs advised me to), a long time ago, my old coral banded shrimp would shed...

 

Well from what I've read they should molt about once a month and so far that's what the've been doing. When I said one a week that was because I have 3. Do you still think that is too often? What would adding Iodine do?

 

iodine is needed for them to molt properly, I have also heard they molt about once a month, more then that is unhealthy(too much iodine) less then that and they could ide if they cant molt correctly, so with three and about one per week, or a little longer I'd think it'd be ok

 

Sorry, read your last message incorrectly. If your shrimp are only molting once a month, that's perfectly fine. I have never seen any need to add additional iodine to a tank and there is no scientific proof to date that our corals or other animals even use the type that is commonly sold as an aquarium supplement. Adding iodine WILL do more harm than good regardless of what you may have read and heard about it. And it can cause algae blooms to boot. Yet another reason why I don't recommend that anyone use Purple Up as it contains iodine among other things that you don't really need to add to your tank if you do regular water changes