I have been keeping shrimp for close to a year now. Like most newbies, I started out with a few cherry shrimp and have learned from many mistakes and can hopefully help any aspiring shrimp keepers from making the same mistakes. Here are a few tips that I have learned over the years from mistakes and hopefully you can learn from them too!

  First I received a batch of around 15 cherry shrimp in the mail and had great success with them. Just from these shrimp I now have over 200 or even more shrimps in my tanks. My first advice to give any new shrimp keepers is if possible try to have a species only tank with them. Although I was successful at first in keeping the cherry shrimp in my 20 gallon community tank, most of the time I noticed they were hiding from my fish. Although my fishes where too slow for them, the shrimp still felt scared enough to hide away under the driftwood and in the plants (the fish consisted of a dwarf gouarmi, a few cardinal tetras, and some ottos). Only the bravest adult shrimps would manage to come out and roam the tanks. I have only witnessed the fish eating my shrimp once or twice and it was because the baby shrimps would be swimming along the water column and the cardinals would try and snatch them. With this situation, I felt the shrimp were there but not anything too interesting because I never got to truly see their fascinating behaviors, which they do have a bunch of personality!

  The shrimp population in my community tank was increasing at a steady rate and began to dip down slowly after a while. This was perhaps the most frustrating point of my shrimp keeping hobby. I had around 80 or so shrimp in my tanks and all the sudden every day, one by one the shrimps would just die until I only had approximately twenty or so shrimps left. I had no idea what was wrong with them; I tried to rule out any possible contaminations with no avail. Then one day, I asked a senior aquarium hobbyist about my situation. He recommended that I have not been specifically feeding the shrimps enough protein based foods! My first reaction was complete astonishment! This is a factor I believe most shrimp based websites do not emphasize enough. These shrimps *are* omnivores and need some source of protein in their diets to do well long term. At first doubting his advice, I went ahead and feed the shrimps a few sinking pellets after my fish were well fed every few days out of desperation. The shrimp deaths stopped almost immediately! Before this, the only thing feed to them was nothing other than the algae that grew in the tank.

  Although I gave the shrimps more protein, it was really hard to feed both the shrimps and fish since the fish learned quick and competed from the sinking pellets designed for the shrimps. So I finally starting a tank specifically only for the shrimps, I noticed a big difference. After a month or so, the cherry shrimp became more active, roamed the tank a lot more and started reproducing more as well. I was able to feed them more specifically and cater the shrimps to their own needs. With this, my collection grew. Now I currently am raising over six or seven different types of shrimps and all are doing great.

  In conclusion, my two mistakes that could be prevented and not known about are the following; if possible keep shrimp in a species tank. They will grow much better and you'll get to enjoy their fascinating behavior without the threat of fish eating them. Second, many shrimp keepers do not realize that many shrimps we keep are omnivores and do require additional foods other than algae. Feed them protein foods such as fish flakes or pellets. You will notice a great improvement in berried shrimps and a great increase in survival rates.

Best of luck,