Are you kidding me??? How to "decontaminate"?

shoggoth43

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Jan 15, 2009
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I'm at the LFS where I find some "blue bee shrimp". Ok, looks kind of like blue tigers but what the heck, they're neat. I snag a few and head home to find one of the LED socketed lamps decided to let go and drop in the edge tank where I have all the shrimp. BAD. Several dead due to copper and who knows what else from the wired color slime on the LEDs.

So, out come what shrimp I can catch that aren't clearly dead and I flush them a few times in water from the cube. No other real tank to put them in so they go in there and out comes the ghost shrimp. 48 hours later it seems like most of them made it. The bee shrimp are so small I have no idea where they went so that might be wasted money but I did see one the next day and I check the filter floss when I change it. The black neons don't seem to care about shrimp in general and I suspect the cories would only eat them unintentionally. I did a full water change today and really freaked out the bamboo shrimp but otherwise everyone seems back to normal.

I threw the plants from the contaminated tank in with the cardinals since they were getting treated with copper and whatever else is in the antiparasite foods.

So, how do I decontaminate my edge tank? I'm assuming the substrate is a write off anyway, but I'd prefer not to lose the plants. How can I flush them out? Two of them are mossballs so I suspect they may have soaked up some of the copper and other chemicals.

Thoughts?

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S
 
C

csmith

Guest
I've always heard carbon in the filter and Seachem CupriSorb would get the job done for copper in all forms.

I'm sure water changes don't hurt, either.
 
Last edited:

Biollante

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Good Thing To Know

Hi S,

Charcoal (activated of course) will take out copper, high quality is better change often especially if you are using cheap charcoal.

Purigen is also good, again change out and recharge often and/or alternate with charcoal.

ChemiPure is messy but effective and grabs a wider range of stuff.

That CupriSorb, CSmith mentioned sounds good as well, though I don't think I have used it, can't recall.

Good thing to know about those LED things, sorry it happened to you, but it is a good warning for the rest of us. :(

Good luck,
Biollante
 

shoggoth43

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I had been thinking of custom LED setup with heatsink and all that but "Hey, they have these neat LED lamps that fit in existing sockets!" so why bother right? Yet another project on the todo list. Oh well. Looks like most of the critters are fine with their new home. That bamboo shrimp has decided he doesn't want to come out of the overflow so he's probably in there for the duration. Maybe he's in a molting mood. No biggie. I'll just have to remember he's in there. I can just imagine forgetting it and a few months later changing the filter floss and having a 4" shrimp climb up my hand followed by it flying across the room with a less than dignified yell from me. :)

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S