You Need a Neocaridina Shrimp Tank

Too often, we look at shrimp in the aquarium as an afterthought, just seasoning on an already beautiful display. The truth is that the genus of nearly all the decorative freshwater shrimp regularly available to us as hobbyists, called Neocaridina make for a really intriguing display all on their own, or at least as an equally important aspect as the plants or fish in a desktop aquarium.

Really small tanks are difficult to keep fish healthy in. The inherent difficulty lies in water volume. Water parameters of all kinds increase in stability when you increase the amount of water in the tank. The smaller the tank, the harder it is to keep nutrients diluted, or temperature and pH stable. This means little tanks are the easiest to overload. They're also the hardest to hide hardware in. This is why, in nearly every advice column of ours (or anyone else) you'll see 10 to 20 gallons recommended as a minimum tank size even for very small fish. But we've all seen aquariums that are two to ten gallons for sale, so what gives? These are the perfect tanks for your desktop and ideal displays for Neocaridina Shrimp.

You can really keep as many different species and colors of Neocaridina Shrimp as you like and will fit in your aquarium. A veritable rainbow of colors can be scuttling around your tank if you so choose. There is a caveat to this. Shrimp in this genus will reproduce with basically no effort from you and they aren't picky about only mating with their species or shrimp of the same color form. When Neocaridina Shrimp of different species mate, a very high percentage of the offspring will revert to wild colors which will usually be some shade of tan / brown or even clear. If you don't mind this, go forth, but most of you will want to keep the brilliant blues, reds and whites that the parent shrimp are showing, and to keep these colors true, you'll want to pick one color in your display. Which really isn't going to be a problem, a display full of blue or red or yellow shrimp all over a lush, planted backdrop looks amazing.

These little shrimps require almost no space, given enough food for them, and they don't need much of that either. This in turn helps keep the inherent small tank nutrient issues under control. The display will need some filtration, and some great choices are under gravel filters and sponge filters. Both of these will conglomerate food in specific locations (either the bottom or on the sponge) making it easier for the shrimp to clean up! If you decide to go with a larger filter system like a hang on back or a canister (massive overkill) be sure to cover the intake with a sponge to prevent your shrimp from being sucked into the filtration, which becomes even more meaningful when they inevitably begin to breed as the offspring will be tiny and easily vacuumed up into the filter system.

Mostly your Neocardinia are going to be bio-film eaters. Biofilm is the stuff that grows on everything in a tank. It's mostly algae, but it's also got a component of other single cell organisms. The more surfaces there are for biofilm to grow on, the more food there is available for the shrimp (and the babies) to eat. It will grow on the glass, the bottom, the rocks, driftwood, even the plants of a tank. We offer our retail partners a wide selection of aquarium appropriate rocks and driftwood through our Ecoscape line; there are really attractive options for just about any aesthetic! A staff favorite among our shrimp lovers is the Dragon Stone line which is very porous and offers shrimp tons of hiding places and a huge amount of surface area for biofilm growth.

You can easily keep shrimp in a nearly bare display and for those of you looking to breed them, this is a great option, allowing for the easy removal of the shrimp once they get big enough. That being said, shrimp also looks great in planted displays. As your tank is likely to be very small, and very low tech, you might want to keep little plants that are hardy and durable like Java Moss, Christmas Moss, and maybe some smaller Anubias varieties like Nana Petite. All these plants can do well in tanks that don't offer intense lighting or supplemental carbon dioxide. Your shrimp will love plants of all kinds, so the world is your oyster when it comes to planting but be sure the plants you choose will be size appropriate and are suited for the level of technology you're planning to employ in the display.

One of the primary limitations of small tanks is the lack of space / inability to hide hardware like heaters. Luckily most Neocaridina shrimp don't need tropical temperatures (but they'll be fine in them). A tank temp in the mid-60s to the mid 70's is perfect and so as long as your house isn't really cold or really hot, you probably won't need any temperature control. If the room with your tank does get colder than the low 60s, you should look into a heater. If the space routinely gets higher than 80 degrees for long periods, you may need to rethink a desktop tank in this space or maybe choose a new space to work in! 

As far as keeping the shrimp, start small, not just shrimp, which will always be small, but in number; one or two per gallon is plenty. If you have a 3-gallon aquarium, and you add five shrimp to it, they will quickly fill it up and probably overfill it capacity wise fairly quickly. What is over capacity? This is a bit of a sliding scale but basically keep an eye on your nitrates. If they start to rise, because you need to feed too much for your filtration to keep up with, you're going to need to remove some shrimp, and this is somewhat inevitable if your tank is thriving. Excess shrimp can be stocked in other tanks or fed to fish in other displays. You can give (or sell) them to other aquarists. If you have a good relationship with your Local Fish Store, they might even start buying shrimp from you!

Oh yes, feeding. Well, this can be really easy. If you have an established tank with lots of surface area for biofilm to grow on, you'll likely not need to feed anything until you have more shrimp than biofilm. Once you do start feeding, it will first be about once a week, and gradually this might work up to about three times per week. After that, you have too many shrimp! You can feed them sinking fish food, pellets, shrimp sticks and algae wafers. We like to use Nutramar Freshwater Algae and Color Boost Shots, but in very small aquariums, you'll need to cut them down to size in order to avoid overfeeding. A great way to see how much food you need to be supplementing is the glass bowl technique. Put a large glass petri dish (or similar glass bowl) in the bottom of the tank and put a small amount of food in it. If the shrimp eat it all within an hour or two, they need feeding and will need feeding again in a day or two. Use a bit more food on the next feeding and repeat the experiment. On the other end of the spectrum, if they don't eat all the food within a couple hours you should remove the uneaten food and reduce the amount next time you feed. If your shrimp don't really pay any attention to the food, you don't need to be feeding or at least feeding as much. In this case, suspend the feeding for a week or two and run the experiment again. You'll find that over time, the bowl method makes it easy to see what's being eaten and also makes siphoning out excess food much easier!

Maintaining aquariums for Neocaridina Shrimp is pretty much like any other fishtank you keep. Clean the viewing glass, do water changes and clean filters. Small aquarium water changes do need to be done a little more carefully than when done in big tanks. If you remove two gallons from a four-gallon tank, you've done a 50% water change and so the temperature of the replacement water can have a dramatic effect on the temperature of the tank. Just make sure the makeup water is within a degree or two of the water you remove.

If you want to keep some fish in your shrimp tank, this is entirely possible as long as the fish you choose don't have an appetite for shrimp, which is pretty rare. So at least you should add fish that are too small to actually eat your adult shrimp, but you'll likely be sacrificing baby shrimp to any fish you add. They're just too delicious and bite sized for any fish to ignore.

Neocardinia Shrimp are very resilient and can tolerate some moderate changes in water chemistry, and temperature (which are two of the biggest struggles in smaller aquariums). Tiny desktop tanks aren't the easiest aquarium to keep, for the reasons we've gone over, but it is certainly one of the most rewarding because it is the one that is right in front of you every day. Aquatropic retail partners have access to a huge variety of freshwater ornamental shrimp, in a wild number of colors, a full list of which can be seen here: https://www.qualitymarine.com/aquatropic/invertebrates/shrimp/  Now go forth and get that little beauty of a desktop display and fill it with some Neocaridina Shrimp from Aquatropic today!