Common illnesses, quarantine, and safe treatments.
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…
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 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 a Sulawesi tank looked fine at lights out and holds dead shrimp in the morning, the cause is almost always something that changed in the previous 24 hours, in the water or in the room. The readings that would…
A Sulawesi shrimp sitting on the bottom is only fine if something on it is still moving. Grazing shrimp work their mouthparts constantly, sweep their antennae and fan their swimmerets, even when they haven’t crossed the rock in ten minutes.…
Sulawesi shrimp are supposed to sit on the rock and graze. When they leave it and start swimming laps, one of two things is happening. Either the adult males are responding to a female, or something is wrong with the…
If your Sulawesi shrimp have gone pale, the cause is almost always something in the tank rather than something in the shrimp. Light, background, a recent molt and above all the water move color around in these animals, and the…
When Sulawesi shrimp die in the days after you add them, the cause is almost never something you can treat. It’s nearly always the water they moved into, or a tank that had finished cycling but hadn’t finished maturing. That…
If your Sulawesi shrimp started dying in the hours or days after a water change, the change itself is the most likely cause, and it’s almost always the difference between the new water and the tank water, or something the…
Care guides for Sulawesi shrimp mostly say two to three hours, but the real answer depends on how far apart the two waters are. No published study gives a measured acclimation time for this group. So the honest answer is…
Most of the work in acclimating Sulawesi shrimp happens before the box reaches your door. If the tank is already warm, alkaline, cycled and grazed over, arrival day is short: bring the sealed bag to the same temperature as the…
If the adults in your Sulawesi tank look normal and the shrimplets keep vanishing, the cause is rarely a disease you can treat. Newly released Sulawesi shrimp (lake Caridina spp.) die from problems that only reach an animal that small.…
