Hello there! Where ever you are reading this from, I wish you good health and happiness. With all that is going on around the world, health and happiness comes as a luxury these days.

Touching on health, our shrimps shell holds the key importance to their health as it acts as an exoskeleton protecting them and providing them with a "backbone". Several important minerals are required to help your shrimp grow a nice good shiny shell.

When your shrimps have problem molting, its a sign that there might be excessive mineral content in your water which causes the shell to grow too hard for the shrimps to molt. That is when we start changing our tank water with distill water. By doing this, it dilutes the mineral content in your water that stops "feeding" the shrimp so that the shell wouldn't grow too thick.

Vice versa, when your shrimps have problem growing back new shells, its a sign that the beneficial mineral content in your water is too low, this can be solved by simply adding more commercially available minerals into your tank.

The two types of minerals available in the market are mineral salt and mineral solution. Mineral salt are generally cheaper as they don't have to go through the process of diluting and mixing the content in water. It's just a combination of different minerals in powder form mixed into a bottle.

Mineral solution on the other hand can be slightly more expensive because the solution have been mixed up and ready to use anytime in your tank. Pretty much you can use it right off the shelf when you purchase them. So how do we go about using these products for our aquarium.

For mineral salts, do not add them directly into your tank. Prepare a pail of pure water, and start adding a scoop of the salt into the pail, give a good stir and aeration to ensure that it's mixed up well. Let it sit and rest for a day or two with aeration as there might be residue below the pail that is not mixing well with the water. Occasionally, you can give it a good stir. Once it's ready, add bit by bit of the mixed solution into your aquarium at a five minutes interval, measuring your aquarium water with a TDS pen to ensure that the TDS reaches your desired level.

The cons of mineral salts is that, salts that are not dissolved might slowly be dissolving in your tank. That causes unwanted raise in gH that might kill your shrimplets. So make sure that your salts are fully dissolve before adding the solution in.

For mineral solution, the mixing of the salt part have already been done by the manufacturers. This is one of my favourites as I am really lazy. After water change, just dose a little of this solution and see how high my TDS raises up to, then gradually adjust to my desired level.

Needless to say, a TDS pen is also very important when adding minerals into your tank as it provides a gauge for you to know when its too much or too little.

I hope this short guide here can help you with this common issue of shrimp keeping. If you have other questions, or would like to get in touch, feel free to mail me at demin@madshrimp.com