Everything we wish someone had told us before our first colony. Ten minutes here will save you months of head-scratching.
1 · Your first shrimp tank, step by step
You need surprisingly little: a tank of 20 litres or more, a gentle sponge filter, a heater if your room swings cold, substrate, and more plants and botanicals than feel reasonable. Shrimp graze biofilm all day, and biofilm grows on surfaces, so moss, wood and leaf litter are not decoration, they are the buffet.
Set the tank up, then cycle it before any shrimp arrive. Cycling means growing the bacteria that convert toxic ammonia into harmless nitrate, and it takes four to six weeks. Add a small ammonia source, test weekly, and when the tank converts ammonia to nitrate within 24 hours with zero nitrite, you are ready. Patience here matters more than anything else you will buy. A mature tank is hard to get wrong; a brand new one is fragile.
2 · Neocaridina vs Caridina: which to choose
Neocaridina (Cherry Reds, Blue Dreams, Orange Sakura…) are the easy ones. They are happy in most UK tap water once dechlorinated, tolerate a wide range of parameters, and breed readily. Start here. Really, start here.
Caridina (Crystal Reds, tigers, King Kongs…) are the fancy ones. They want soft, slightly acidic water, which usually means remineralised RO water over an active substrate. It is not difficult once set up, but it is more kit, more discipline and less forgiveness. A brilliant second tank.
3 · Water parameters, minus the jargon
GH is general hardness, the minerals shrimp need to build their shells. KH is carbonate hardness, which stops pH swinging about. TDS is total dissolved solids, a rough measure of how much is in the water overall. You will find target ranges on every product page.
The secret most beginners miss: stability beats perfection. Shrimp cope fine with slightly-off numbers that never move; they cope badly with perfect numbers that bounce around. Small weekly water changes with temperature-matched, remineralised water are the whole game.
4 · pH and soil: the big Caridina vs Neocaridina difference
If you only remember one technical thing from this page, make it this: the two families want different pH, and you set pH with your substrate, not with bottles of chemicals.
Neocaridina like neutral to slightly alkaline water, around pH 6.8 to 7.8, which is what most UK tap water already is. So they get inert substrate: sand or fine gravel that does nothing to the water. Cheap, permanent, done.
Caridina (Crystals, King Kongs and, less fussily, our tigers) want soft, acidic water around pH 5.5 to 6.5. That is the job of an active soil, an aquarium buffering substrate that pulls pH down and holds it there. Pair it with RO water remineralised using a GH+ salt and you have the classic Caridina recipe: the soil controls pH, the salt provides shell-building minerals, and with zero KH in the water there is nothing to fight the soil.
Two warnings from experience. Active soil is a consumable: it buffers for roughly one to two years, then needs replacing, so date the bag when you set up. And do not mix the recipes. Tap water’s KH will exhaust an active soil in months, and a Neocaridina colony perched on acidic soil is paying for plumbing it never asked for. Choose the family first, then the substrate, then the water.
5 · Feeding: little, rarely, and why
A mature planted tank feeds a colony almost by itself. Top up with a quality shrimp food two or three times a week, in portions they finish within a couple of hours, and remove anything left over. Overfeeding is the number one shrimp killer. It fouls the water and invites pests. When in doubt, feed less. Then less than that.
6 · That little saddle, and where shrimplets come from
Look at a healthy adult female and you may spot a bright patch behind her head, shaped like a tiny riding saddle. Those are her ovaries, visible through the shell, and a saddled female is one moult away from motherhood. When she moults she releases a scent into the water, the males sprint laps of the tank like it is the last day of the sales, and a day or so later she will be berried: carrying a clutch of eggs tucked under her tail.
She fans the eggs constantly for roughly four weeks. Then, no drama, no larval stage: fully formed shrimp the size of a grain of rice appear, already grazing. The best thing you can do for them is nothing. Keep the sponge filter (it cannot eat anyone), keep the moss and leaf litter thick, skip big water changes for a week or two, and resist counting them. They hide brilliantly and turn up when they are ready.
7 · Moulting, or why your shrimp left its skin in the moss
Shrimp grow by climbing out of their own shells, usually every few weeks. The empty moult looks alarmingly like a dead shrimp; the difference is that a moult is hollow, ghost-white and intact. Leave it in the tank. The colony eats it to recycle the minerals, which is equal parts thrifty and slightly gothic.
A freshly moulted shrimp is soft and vulnerable, so it will hide for a day or two. Normal. What is not normal is repeated failed moults across the colony, and the cause is nearly always water: GH too low to build a new shell, or parameters that jumped suddenly. Keep GH in range, change water little and often, and moulting takes care of itself.
8 · Tank mates: who can live with shrimp
The honest answer: the safest shrimp tank is a shrimp tank. Snails are the exception and make excellent flatmates; nerites, ramshorns and pond snails neither chase shrimp nor eat babies.
Fish are a compromise. Anything that can fit a shrimplet in its mouth will conduct the experiment, and most fish can. Small, peaceful surface-dwellers (chili rasboras, ember tetras) mostly coexist with adults while quietly capping your population growth. Keep expensive Caridina away from fish entirely, and never mix shrimp with bettas, barbs or anything labelled “semi-aggressive”, which is fish-shop language for “will eat your shrimp in order of price”.
9 · When things wobble
Deaths right after a water change usually mean the new water was too different: temperature, TDS or chlorine. Match temperature, remineralise to the same TDS, always dechlorinate, and pour slowly.
Little white worms on the glass are usually harmless detritus worms telling you to feed less. Flatworms that glide rather than wriggle are planaria, which do hunt shrimplets; cut feeding right back and treat with a planaria-specific remedy, carefully, because some treatments hurt snails.
A shrimp that is pale, inactive or swimming oddly is telling you to test the water before you do anything else. Test, do not guess. And if the numbers look fine but something still seems off, email us a photo at surreyshrimp@gmail.com. We answer shrimp-paramedic emails most days.
