I am the founder of Shrimp Aquatics and a freshwater aquarist with 4 years of hands-on experience keeping and breeding ornamental shrimp, fish, and invertebrates. Based in Ho Chi Minh City, one of the world's leading hubs for aquatic livestock, I test every care guide in my own fish room before publishing.
Care-guide methodology: husbandry advice is checked against observations from our own tanks where applicable, while species and water-parameter claims are reviewed against cited sources. Read our Content Policy.
Yes. Sulawesi shrimp (Caridina spp.) will settle on a piece of blanched spinach and work it over, and nothing in the published evidence says the leaf itself poisons them. The catch isn’t the spinach. It’s that these shrimp are fine…
Baby Sulawesi shrimp eat what the adults eat: the living film of algae, diatoms and bacteria that grows over rock, glass and filter surfaces. Nothing published measures what a newly hatched Sulawesi shrimp actually takes, so the useful answer is…
Yes. A Sulawesi tank is normally built from reverse osmosis water and a Sulawesi-specific mineral salt. So the supplement isn’t an extra you add on top of the water. It’s what turns pure water into water these shrimp can live…
Yes, Sulawesi shrimp will climb onto a piece of blanched vegetable and work at it, and there is nothing wrong with offering one. What they take off it is mostly the soft surface material, not the plant fiber underneath. That…
Yes. Sulawesi shrimp will graze spirulina, and nothing about them makes it a strange food. These lake Caridina spend their day scraping biofilm, aufwuchs and algae off rock. Spirulina (Arthrospira platensis) reaches the tank as a dried powder or pressed…
No. Sulawesi shrimp don’t need CO2, and a pressurized CO2 system doesn’t belong on a Sulawesi display tank. The group is kept at pH 7.5-8.5 with KH 3-6 dKH, and injected CO2 pulls against both of those numbers at once.…
Yes, but only one kind of algae. Sulawesi shrimp graze the thin living film that grows on rock, glass and hardscape, which is mostly diatoms, single-celled algae, bacteria and fine detritus bound together. They don’t touch the algae most keepers…
Sulawesi shrimp (lake Caridina species) are kept in warm, mildly alkaline water with a modest mineral load. The practical way to hit that is to start from RO or RO/DI water and build it back up with a mineral made…
Sulawesi shrimp are demanding, but the ways a colony goes wrong aren’t mysterious. They trace back to a short list of decisions taken before the shrimp ever arrived: an active soil working against the pH, mineral that never fully dissolved,…
No water change interval has ever been measured or published for Sulawesi shrimp, the lake endemic Caridina species from Sulawesi’s ancient lakes. Every figure in circulation, from 10% a month to 30% a week, comes from keeper practice. What actually…
Choose Sulawesi hardscape on two questions. Does the rock change your water? Does it hold a film the shrimp can graze? Inert volcanic lava rock answers both, which is why it’s the working default in this tank. Carbonate rock fails…
You raise pH for Sulawesi shrimp by rebuilding the water outside the tank and exchanging it in slowly, not by dosing the running tank. Mix RO water with a Sulawesi mineral salt that buffers to the target, test the finished…
