Coral Banded Shrimp: molting or DOA?

[thegrubers]

The 2+ year old coral banded shrimp in our tank isn't looking well at all. She's molted lots of times previously, but always in secret, so we never saw the process. Both pincer arms have fallen off, and she hasn't moved in several hours. From my recollection of previous molts, the pincer arms were attached to the molt, but I could be off. Is this part of the molt process? If not, why on earth would the arms fall off? Can this shrimp be saved?

[kmk2307]

[welcome]

You are right, the claws do not detach from the body in normal molting. I'm afraid I have no idea why this has happened. What is your water chemistry like? Could something have attacked it? I doubt the animal will survive. Sorry.

Kevin

[thegrubers]

Kevin, Thanks for your input. Unfortunately, the shrimp did not recover. I doubt we would get another coral banded. They are so beautiful and fun to watch, but are too aggressive and limit other animals we can add to the tank.

Iodine/iodide did test low, so we will more carefully monitor that before adding more shrimp/inverts. The shrimp would have no predators in the tank. It's mostly coral, with only 2 blue-green chromis and a mandarin dragonet, a few hermit crabs and two turbo snails. The tank is 125g, and over 2 years old. Of course, there's always the possibility of parasites, which would be difficult to see. She had been fed larger pieces of what I feed the coral -- krill, mysis shrimp and zooplankton, and Cyclops-eeze -- every other day.

My husband is rallying to add peppermint shrimp (L. wurdemanni) , as we have aiptasia. Perhaps that indicates another water param that's off that we don't know to test for. All other params (pH, NH4, NO2, NO3, Ca, specific gravity, phosphates) are at their appropriate levels. I'm the type that likes to know what went wrong before putting another animal in danger. It's highly likely that the shrimp was at the end of a normal life span and it's safe to add more (peaceful!) shrimp -- after we get the iodine levels up, of course.

If you can suggest some chemical/biological parameter to measure or test before we add more shrimp, please let me know. I'm especially interested in how to discover parasites that invade shrimp/other inverts.... just in case.