Advice for New Neocaridina Keepers

Here’s my advice for someone starting out with neocaridina shrimp. I don’t pretend to be an expert, but my colony is thriving so I’m doing something right.

Tank Setup

Add some floating plants like Red Root Floaters or Salvinia - they’re easy to maintain (just pull a clump or two out every week or so when the surface of the tanks is more than 50% covered), the shrimp love to hang out in the roots and graze on the biofilm there, and they do a great job of sucking ammonia/nitrate/nitrite out of the water.

I like having a nursery area in my tank for the babies. Basically throw some moss (any moss but Marimo moss balls - those are too dense for the shrimp to crawl it inside to hide) in a low-flow section of the tank. It’ll make the female shrimp feel a little more secure knowing there’s a safe place for their babies to hide in, and for them to hide in after a molt. I use java moss because someone generously gave me some for free when I was starting my tank, but It doesn’t really matter what kind.

If you’re considering an airstone, go with a sponge filter instead. It’ll do just as much good as the airstone and the sponge surface develops a lot of biofilm - there are always some babies and a half dozen or so adults grazing on mine. My tanks are heavily planted and handled the nitrate/nitrite/ammonia fine before I added filters but I like having something to cause some water flow and give the shrimp a grazing area.

Give them plenty of hiding places. They know they’re on the bottom of the food chain, and even in a single-species tank they’ll feel more secure if they have places to hide. Moss, dense plants like a carpet of short to medium plants, piles of little rocks with nooks and crannies, these are all good. Small chunks of lava rock in piles will not only provide hiding places, and they will accumulate a lot of biofilm & algae in the pores for shrimp to graze on

Add some botanicals like Catappa, Mulberry or Oak Leaves, and/or Alder cones. Cholla wood is also good - my colony loves to graze on it, and I frequently see smaller shrimp hanging out inside the hollow core.

Feeding

While neocaridinas can live on just algae and biofilm, they will breed faster and have bigger clutches if you feed them high protein food occasionally. It takes a month or two for enough biofilm to build up in a new tank to feed more than a half dozen shrimp, so feed them a couple of times a week until then. I only clean the sides of my tank that face the room and leave the other two sides to develop a layer of algae and/or biofilm for the colony to graze on.

Variety is the spice of life. They don’t eat the same thing every day in the wild, so I don’t feed them the same food every time either. I prefer to put their food in a feeding dish to make it easier to suck out uneaten food with a turkey baster after a couple of hours. If you leave a lot of uneaten food in the tank it’ll start to decay and foul the water, or the snails in your tank will gobble it down and you’ll have to deal with a snail population explosion.

Not all colonies like the same foods. Here are some that my colonies enjoy.

Bacter AE

I add Bacter AE to my tanks twice a week and since I started doing that, I’ve noticed more of the babies surviving to the point they’re large enough to see and start exploring the tank. I don’t use nearly as much as the instructions on the jar say to though, I put about half a rice grain’s worth per 5 gallons of tank in an old vitamin bottle half filled with tank water, shake it till it’s mixed well and doesn’t have any clumps, then pour it across the top of the tank, with a little extra over the moss patch where the babies are usually hiding.

Egg Yolk

My colony really likes hard boiled egg yolk - I put in about a quarter yolk for every 20 shrimp and it rarely takes more than an hour to be devoured. Put it in a feeding dish though, it breaks apart quickly and it’s a lot easier to pull the dish out if they don’t eat it than to chase all the debris with a turkey baster. It’s a treat food - even in a feeding dish it can make a mess.

Vegetables

You can feed them vegetables too. Blanch them for about 3 minutes in boiling water, then dunk them in ice water for 30 seconds to stop them from cooking any further. This softens them so they’re easier to eat, and helps keep them from floating. I’ve fed my colony cucumber and zucchini (peeled in case there are any fertilizers or pesticide contaminating the peel) in slices just thick enough that they can go onto a skewer, lettuce and kale. I have heard people talk about feeding their colonies squash, baby carrots, cauliflower and broccoli too. Put the vegetable on a skewer so it’s easier to pull it out after 24 hours so it doesn’t start to rot.

I make home-made frozen food for my colonies. Any snello recipe you find online will do, my personal recipe is here. I give it to them at least once a week.

Commercial Food Options

As far as commercial food goes, I feed my colony Fluval Bug Bites (I use both the bottom feeder formula and the shrimp formula) one day a week. There are plenty of other good food options out there. You can get them food designed for shrimp, but they’ll happily eat flake or bottom feeder food too. The main thing is to make sure that the first ingredient is something like krill, some sort of insect or fish meal. You don’t want something with wheat or even corn as the first ingredient. I give mine roughly 1 pellet of the bug bites per ten shrimp in the colony.

Soy Hulls / Snowflake Food

Soy Hull pellets are also good. They’re usually called Snowflake food. It’s something like 11% protein and it breaks down into white flakes (hence the name) that can be in your tank for a fairly long time without fouling the water. Buy Soy Hull Pellets instead of ones labeled as shrimp food. Get organic ones meant for mushroom cultivation. Why? Snowflake food ranges from $3.70 an ounce to $12 an ounce on Amazon. Soy Hulls (at least the ones I bought) come in a ten pound bag, and cost $0.13 an ounce. It’s 28x cheaper than the cheapest Snowflake food I found. Buy the ten pound bag, then trade one pound bags of it to other shrimpkeepers for plants or shrimp so the pellets don’t go bad on you.

Bloodworms

My colony likes bloodworms. I prefer freeze dried to frozen for a couple of reasons. First, it’s easier to portion them out since you don’t have to give them a whole cube. Secondly, I’ve seen multiple videos and posts where people talked about getting parasites from frozen worms, but no complaints about freeze-dried.

One warning about bloodworms - some people (I’ve read 20%) can develop allergies after frequent contact with frozen or freeze-dried bloodworms. It can sometimes cause people to develop allergies to shrimp as well. I only handle it with tweezers. If you do have an allergic reaction, it typically gets more severe rse with each exposure, so be safe and don’t try to use gloves or tweezers with them, just get rid of them.

How much should you feed the colony?

You want to feed them no more than they can finish in an hour or so. You should break up the pellets of food (you don’t need to bother with this with soy hulls, they break up as they expand in water) - that will let more of the shrimp get at the food without getting into shoving matches.

If you over feed your tank, the shrimp population will boom. It’s only really an aesthetic problem, and you can solve it long term by reducing the amount you’re feeding your colony. In the short term, use aquarium tweezers to crush them and feed them to your colony. They’ll appreciate the high protein, high calcium snack.

When you see shrimp molts, don’t bother to remove them from the tank unless they’ve got something growing on them. The shrimp will eat them and it’ll help them make their next exoskeleton. Same for dead shrimp - unless there are a lot of them at once, they were killed by disease, or they have something growing on them, the colony will recycle them pretty quickly. I’ve never seen a body last more than a couple of hours, and once my colony hit 40ish shrimp, they get eaten so fast I almost never spot a body.

Water

You should be testing for GH and KH in addition to ammonia/nitrite/nitrate. My tanks are heavily planted so I only test once or twice a week.

Don’t chase “perfect” water parameters. Neocaridina are tolerant of a pretty wide range of water parameters, and it’s far more important for the parameters to be stable than that they be at a specific “perfect” level. You will kill more shrimp chasing perfect water than if you leave things where they’re stable.

Breeding

Ideally you start with a ratio of one male to three females. I recommend starting with a minimum of 10 and preferably 20 shrimp. Smaller groups sometimes end up all female because they’re bigger and more colorful.

Feed the colony high protein foods to promote egg production. Most of the stuff I listed in the food section will do.

Baby shrimp have a yolk sac