At a total loss
I've had this tank for probably close to a year now and it's been nothing but constant problems. All was fine until I went on a week long vacation in November and had someone inexperienced look after it while I was gone.
They overfed my recovering pet store betta and he unfortunately passed not long after.
Then all of my other fish slowly fell ill and died to some kind of white, fuzzy infection I could never quite identify. So I decided to make this a shrimp tank. Now, almost all my shrimp are covered in vorticella and I just feel so defeated I'm not sure how to proceed.
I know there's salt dips but it seems like a massively widespread infection, so picking out all the shrimp to individually salt dip sounds tedious. I previously went through a gauntlet of treatments to try and make sure whatever killed my fish had died. I'm worried about hurting my snails with any more treatments, I have bladder snails and a mystery snail.
I did melafix, completed that treatment then did kanaplex, and right now I have some Expel-F dissolving in the water because I figured it was fungal before realizing it was definitely vorticella.
Water parameters: pH 7.6 temp 75-80° ammonia 0 nitrite 0 nitrate 40-80. I do weekly 40% water changes (4 gallons of the 10 gallon) and squeeze out the sponge for the filter every time to ensure it's flowing properly.
What in the world am I doing wrong? Is my temp off? Do I need to do more frequent water changes? Why does this seem so hard?