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.
Sulawesi shrimp aren’t warm water cherry shrimp with better paintwork. They come out of a handful of very old Indonesian lakes that hold almost nothing a shrimp can eat, and that poverty is what shaped them. Knowing the lakes won’t…
The honest answer is that no fish belongs in a Sulawesi shrimp tank. Some will eat your adults, the peaceful ones eat the shrimplets, and the rest quietly take the biofilm and the open grazing time the colony needs. If…
Pick the pattern you like best, then check it will still show in your tank. Nobody has ranked them. The 2009 revision that named most of these shrimp describes each species’ color pattern and then leaves it there, so “most…
If you want a snail in a Sulawesi shrimp tank, start with the Sulawesi rabbit snails, Tylomelania. They come from the same lakes, they hold the same warm alkaline water, and they don’t breed into a plague. A nerite or…
Yes. Keep Sulawesi shrimp in a tank of their own. The only tankmate we would add on purpose is a Sulawesi rabbit snail, and even that is a waste decision rather than a chemistry one. But “alone” is the wrong…
If your kit is showing any nitrite at all in a Sulawesi tank, treat it as an emergency today. It isn’t a number to keep an eye on. Nobody has published a nitrite tolerance for any Sulawesi lake Caridina, so…
A TDS reading above the 150-250 ppm band Sulawesi shrimp are kept in tells you that something dissolved in your water has been added or concentrated. It doesn’t tell you what. No published study we can find puts a number…
Ammonia poisoning punishes a Sulawesi tank harder than most. The warm alkaline water these shrimp need keeps far more of any ammonia in its toxic un-ionized form, so a number your kit can barely show is already a real dose.…
If the pH reading in your Sulawesi tank has moved and the shrimp are behaving strangely, the speed of the move matters more than the number it landed on. These shrimp come from lakes that barely change from one year…
Both of these shrimp are Caridina, and that’s where the similarity ends. The Amano shrimp (Caridina multidentata) is a large, adaptable river shrimp people buy to graze algae in a planted community tank. Sulawesi shrimp such as the White Sock…
If your Sulawesi shrimp have stopped grazing, gone pale, or started darting around the glass, the tank is almost certainly telling you something about the water rather than about a disease. These are lake animals kept in a narrow band…
If you’re choosing between the two, keep cherry shrimp. Sulawesi shrimp aren’t a harder version of the same animal. They’re a different tank: warm, alkaline, built from RO water, and left to grow a grazing surface for weeks before anything…
