THE SHRIMP CARE CHECKLIST
■ Don’t cook them. Unless your room is very cold, Neocaridina and most Caridina species won’t need heaters. They will easily survive temperatures down to 10°C, but will live much shorter lives when kept above 26°C.
■ Don’t use chemicals near them. Avoid using insecticides in their room, but even scent candles or air fresheners could cause troubles. If you see several of your shrimp getting cramps or dying then it’s the sign of poisoning. A large (90%+) water-change can be a life saver.
■ Don’t tinker with their water (unless there is an emergency). Shrimps love stable conditions. If they seem to be happy don’t alter the water parameters just because someone on the internet said that your TDS is slightly off. Concentrate on the hardness and pH values—if they’re within our recommended range then you are fine. If you have issues (say you’re frequently losing shrimp) change the parameters gradually.
■ Don’t overfeed them. Shrimp don’t need lots of food. A well matured tank contains plenty of biofilm they can graze on. Unless you have hundreds of them in a smallish tank, feeding every other day is more than enough. It’s difficult to underfeed shrimp but overfeeding can lead to water pollution, snail or even Planaria infestation.
■ Don’t overreact if a shrimp dies. Shrimps could unfortunately die from many reasons, but the most frequent one is a failed moult. As shrimp grow, they shed their hard exoskeleton and because this old shell looks like a dead shrimp it may cause unprepared keepers some distress. If you remember that the moult is never coloured, and that a dead shrimp is never transparent, you won’t worry over false alarms unnecessarily.
■ Be careful with medications. All shrimps are sensitive to copper, so only use treatments that are specifically shrimp-safe.
■ Don’t keep them with fishes. With the exception of the larger species most shrimps would do best alone, as the newborn shrimplets are eagerly consumed by almost every fish.