Cherry shrimp care for beginners

This is first because it is the one piece of hardware where the shrimp requirement genuinely differs from a fish tank's, rather than being a preference.

Baby shrimp are a couple of millimetres long and transparent. A hang-on-back or canister intake will draw them in, and a pre-filter sponge over that intake is a workaround for a problem a sponge filter does not have in the first place.

The second reason is biofilm. The sponge itself becomes a grazing surface, which in a shrimp tank is part of the food supply rather than just filtration.

The honest costs. No pump, airline or check valve in the box, so the real purchase is three or four items and the pump is the noisiest thing in the setup. No mechanical polish, so fine particles stay suspended. It is visible inside the tank. And it is a nano device — on a stocked community tank it is a supplement to a main filter rather than a replacement.

If you buy one thing on this page beyond the filter, buy this, and the reason is specific rather than general.

Shrimp grow by molting: they shed an exoskeleton and build a new one, repeatedly, for their whole lives. Building a shell takes minerals out of the water, and water with very little mineral content in it makes that harder. Keepers in soft-water regions lose shrimp at molting while every reading on their master test kit says the tank is perfect — because the master kit never measured the thing that was wrong.

KH matters for a second reason: it is what stops pH drifting between water changes, and shrimp object to movement more than to any particular value.

The honest costs. It tests hardness and nothing else, so it is an addition to a master kit rather than a replacement. Titration is fiddlier than reading a color card — you add drops one at a time, swirl and count, and losing count means starting the vial over. Reagents expire. And a reading is only useful if you are willing to act on it.

This is the correction, and it is deliberately second to the test because buying it without testing is how people overshoot in the opposite direction.

In genuinely soft water, a small amount of crushed coral in the filter or mixed into the substrate raises carbonate and general hardness steadily rather than in a jolt, which is exactly the way you want to move a parameter in a shrimp tank.

It also buffers pH upward and holds it steadier, which addresses the drift problem at the same time.

The honest costs. This is not a neutral substrate and it is not sold as one — it changes water chemistry continuously, and how far it moves yours depends entirely on your starting water. The same handful moves soft water a long way and barely registers in hard water. It is the wrong default for a general community tank and right only after a test said so. And it is a slow lever: add a little, wait a week, test again. Dumping in a bagful is a parameter swing, which is the thing this whole page is trying to avoid.

A conditioner is not optional on any tank, and a shrimp tank is the one where cutting the corner shows fastest. Invertebrates are more sensitive than fish to a number of things that arrive in tap water, and there is no upside to finding out where your own supply sits.

The ammonia-binding claim earns its place here too, because a shrimp tank is usually small and small volumes move quickly.

The honest costs. It does not remove ammonia, it binds it, and your test kit will still read it afterwards. The window is a window rather than a fix. It smells strongly of sulfur. And none of this substitutes for the water change itself.

Plants are closer to infrastructure than decoration in a shrimp tank. Every surface becomes a grazing surface, and a densely planted tank supports a bigger colony on the same amount of added food.

Java fern earns a place specifically because it attaches to hardscape rather than rooting in substrate, tolerates the modest light a kit fixture gives, and does not need the fertilizer dosing that would be another variable to manage.

Cover also changes behavior: shrimp in a bare tank hide, and shrimp in a planted tank are visible all day, which is the entire point of keeping them.

The honest costs. It is slow, so the tank will not look established for months. Its rhizome has to stay above the substrate or it rots, which is the usual way people kill one. And slow growth means it collects algae on older leaves, which rewards a disciplined photoperiod.

Worth owning and worth under-using. In a mature planted tank a colony grazes biofilm and algae more or less continuously, and many established tanks need very little added food at all.

Where it genuinely helps is a young tank that has not grown a biofilm layer yet, or a sparsely planted one where there is simply less to graze.

The honest costs. The failure mode here is overfeeding, not underfeeding: uneaten pellets foul a small tank fast and feed a pest snail population at the same time — see our snail page for where that leads. Feed an amount you would call insultingly small, watch it disappear within a couple of hours, and remove what does not. Pellets also lose value once opened, so buy the smallest tub.

The skip entry, and it is the single most important thing on this page.

API's own product page says it twice: **"API ALGAEFIX Algae Control is not for use with freshwater crustaceans including shrimp, crabs and lobsters"**, and in its directions, **"Caution: do not use with freshwater crustaceans."** The same page separately states the product **"will not harm fish or plants when used as directed."**

Put those two statements next to each other and you have the lesson that keeps shrimp alive: **"aquarium safe" on the front of a bottle means safe for fish.** It is not a statement about invertebrates, and a product can be entirely honest in claiming it while still being lethal to your colony.

This applies well beyond one algaecide. Snail treatments, many medications, and anything copper-based deserve the same check before the cap comes off — and a shrimp tank is a bad place to find out you guessed.

The honest costs of the skip. None as a product, and nothing here says AlgaeFix is badly made or mislabeled — the warning is right there on the maker's page, which is exactly why there is no excuse for dosing it blind. In a fish-only tank it is a legitimate option, though our algae page argues you should think hard before reaching for any algaecide.