Conditioning of Shrimps

Conditioning of Shrimps

Conditioning of shrimp

Temperature acclimation, in shrimps, typically takes 7 days or more. That means that whether the temperature of the water shrimp is increased slowly over a period of 20 minutes to 1 hour or is done almost instantly, the shrimp still requires several days to acclimate to the temperature change. It is also a fact that rapid temperature changes which occur in shrimp environment are stressful. Shrimps that are not conditioned well will scatter around the tank, running up and down, till they are tired and usually these shrimps will just die off the next day or later.

In a shipping bag all kinds of stressful changes occur. First, the temperature typically changes, and often, by more than just a couple of degrees. Secondly, the shrimps excrete ammonia (NH3) and carbon dioxide (CO2) during respiration. Thirdly, the pH changes; typically it drops, and solid particles from feces can accumulate. The water in the shipping bags is polluted by the inhabitants.

Also, due to the fact that there will always be small amounts of dissolved and suspended organics in the bag water there will also be an increase in the bacterial count. Many, in not most, of these bacteria can be pathogenic (disease-causing).

Given the conditions which typically occur in a shipping bag, even with proper treatment of the water, there will still be conditions in the bag at the time of receipt that requires getting the fishes out of the bag and into their receiving tanks as soon as possible.

One should keep in mind that not floating the bag of water is not the entire story. One should get the shrimps out of the bag’s water and into the aquarium environment in which the shrimps will be maintained as quickly as possible. This means that dumping the contents of the bag into a bucket or other container and slowly adding water from the aquarium is not much better than simply floating the bags. Similarly, one should not adjust the pH in the bag to match the aquarium and one should not adjust the pH in the aquarium to match that of the bag.

It is, therefore, not logical to expose the shrimps to the conditions inside the bag any longer than necessary. Floating a bag of shrimps means that the water in the bag usually increases in temperature. A temperature increases of just 5ºC means that the un-ionized (toxic) ammonia level in the bag will increase triplefold!

Increasing the water temperature also increases the shrimps’ metabolism. That means their oxygen consumption increases, their respiration rate increases and the amount of ammonia and carbon dioxide being released into the bag’s water increases.

In general, then, floating a bag of shrimps simply means that the conditions inside the bag are made worse rather than better.

Other Considerations

If the water inside the bag isn’t the best, think about the “stuff” that might be contaminating the outside of the bag. Probably 50% of the boxes used in the aquarium trade are recycled. Few, if any, of these boxes are cleaned and disinfected prior to reuse. They often have water in them left over from the last shipment and sometimes there is even dirt and debris inside.

The actual bags themselves start out clean, but during the the bagging process they are set down on wet tables, laid out on the floor and handled by less than clean hands. In general, the outsides of the bags are dirty and should not be floated.

Therefore floating and slowly pouring in water into the bag do not really work all the time.

What I usually did is acclimatize them by dripping method.

A DIY bottle drilled one small one at the bottle cap, cut of the bottom part, screw in a metal valve, invert it and hang on the side of my tank and drip into a container filled with the new shrimps.

Dripping for few hours is needed, till the water in the container is 3 or 4times as much as the previous water.

Shrimps can be scopped out after dripping process is done and place into their new home, with an important step here of discarding the water that is used for the acclimatizing process. Do not place the water back into the main tank as parasites of other pathogenic bacterias may still exist.

On the safe side, during the conditioning process, chemicals like formalin or potassium permaganate can be used to treat the newly arrived shrimps to prevent any unwanted organisms that can be hosted on the shrimps from entering the new premises.

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