It’s time for our monthly update for May 2020! 

COVID-19 Impacts ongoing

While restrictions are slowly easing within Australia, Sans Vertigo is still being impacted on the postage and shipping front. We’ll continue shipping out on Mondays only to avoid weekend holdovers caused by any further delays. The most heavily impacted area for us is international orders, with some countries relying only on shipping by sea and some countries not accepting any mail at all. Shipping times outside Australia can vary between 25 days to 8 weeks. This differs vastly between different countries, so we’ll be doing our best to keep our shipping information up to date as the situation changes. 

Any international customers outside Australia with concerns about this are welcome to contact us for more details about shipping to their country. While our Shopify hosted website doesn’t have the tools to support more comprehensive information, our Etsy Shop has more shipping information for international customers. 

Charm Updates

As mentioned in last month’s update- we have new shrimp charms! New Orange Eye Blue Tiger (OEBT), Black Bee and an improved Blue Dream set of shrimp charms have been added to the roster of our merchandise collection. These can be found alongside our existing charms in the same listings. 

We have some betta fish charms on the way for those with the betta bug, we’re hoping to have them ready by July (fingers crossed, shipping delays make for uncertain waits). We’re also looking into better connecting rings for the charms- they appear to be the major weakness of most charms and we’ll see if the pieces are compatible with double looped jump rings to avoid loss of pieces. I’ve lost many charms I’ve bought from other artists for the same reasons, and few customers have reported back to me with the same- going out and about with the charm hanging from a bag and somehow it gets caught on something, or gets rough treatment in a crowded place and I come home to find it gone! We’re hoping to test possible improvements as we make our betta fish charms.

Changing Substrates for Shrimp

In May a lot of work has been put into switching the substrates in our shrimp tanks. Originally we’ve been using crushed coral to raise the gH and kH for our neocaridina shrimp. While the shrimp have been thriving, the crushed coral has raised levels a bit higher and faster in recent months. Some crushed coral found its way into the substrate and the substrate has to be changed out to better control the water parameters. We’re about halfway through the substrate changes, so it will disrupt availability of plants.  

In terms of managing pH, gH, and kH- our tap water is very soft and has almost no buffering capacity. It’s up to human input to make sure the pH doesn’t crash, and to ensure our neocaridina have sufficient calcium and minerals to thrive. We’re still using crushed coral, but to a more controlled extent and in very small amounts. 

Next Month…

We didn’t have any new videos this month, largely because I’ve been working on a long series on the Nitrogen Cycle. Because of the quality and production value (and working alone) on the video- it’s going to take a very long time to make. It’s currently in the storyboard and preparation stages for three episodes. I’m really putting my all into making this as professional as I can and challenging my skills with this to turn a familiar, science heavy topic into something refreshing and interesting for both new and old fish keepers to watch. 

On the topic of videos- new videos and photos of our shrimp colonies will be taken and put up on our site in June. This is our custom at Sans Vertigo to reflect the current status of our shrimp colonies, and the gamut of their genetic qualities.

Lets hope that things start to clear up more around the world in coming months, this year has been an interesting one.