Lake Matano Shrimp Species: The List and What Actually Sells

Lake Matano turns up on a lot of shrimp listings, and you’d like to know which of those shrimp actually come from there. Five Caridina species have published records from the lake, and only one of them is likely to be on a stock list you can order from. Nearly every Matano name in the trade, from White Sock to Oiran, is a color line of that one species, so they all need the same water.

Which shrimp species live in Lake Matano?

Five described Caridina species have published records from Lake Matano, and the table below lists the other waters each one is known from. Lake Matano is one of five connected lakes in the Malili system, all drained westward by the Larona River into Bone Bay.¹ That matters for a species list, because a shrimp can be spread across those lakes or stuck in just one of them. Caridina dennerli is the strict case: it’s endemic to Lake Matano, widely distributed within the lake, and a hard substrate dweller that turns up on rock at a range of depths.¹ At the other end sits a Malili species recorded from all three major lakes and the Petea River.¹

Read that middle column closely if provenance matters to you. Only the first species in the table belongs to Lake Matano and nowhere else. The other four are Malili species that happen to have been collected in Matano as well. So a shrimp of one of those species isn’t necessarily a Matano animal at all.

Only one Lake Matano shrimp reaches the hobby

Only one Matano species reaches the hobby, and almost every trade name among the most colorful Sulawesi shrimp in this corner of the hobby is a color line of it. That species is Caridina dennerli. White Sock and Cardinal are the same species. So are Oiran, Blue Ghost, Yellow Ghost, Galaxy and the Orange Eye versions of each. Our own Sulawesi White Sock is one of those lines, and so is everything else in our tank-bred Sulawesi shrimp range that carries a Matano name.

That’s good news for your planning. It’s bad news if you were hoping a rarer name buys an easier animal. A different color line doesn’t come with different water, a different diet or a different tolerance for a young tank. It’s one species wearing several price tags.

Why a Lake Matano label on a listing proves less than it looks

A lake name on a listing tells you less than you’d think, because names travel further than the shrimp do. The Blue Leg Poso shrimp, Caridina caerulea, gets filed loosely under Sulawesi and sometimes under Matano. Yet every specimen in its species description came from Lake Poso and its immediate shoreline, with no Matano or Malili record anywhere in it.⁵ The species on the full list of Lake Poso shrimp species come from a separate system that isn’t part of the Malili chain at all.

So treat the lake name as a starting point and ask two things before you pay. Which species is it, in Latin? And was it bred in a tank or taken out of a lake? If a seller can’t answer the first question, the second answer isn’t worth much either. It also helps to know where Sulawesi shrimp come from as a group, since the same trade names get attached to species from three different lake systems.

Lake Matano origin tells you the water is warm and alkaline, and little else

A Matano origin tells you the water has to be warm and alkaline, and that’s about all it tells you. All five species above share one lake, so they share one set of numbers. This is the range we keep to for every Sulawesi lake species we sell.

What the lake doesn’t tell you is the hard part. Holding one steady point inside that band matters more than picking the prettiest number in it. That takes a mature tank with grazing surfaces already grown in, and a new tank doesn’t have them yet. If you want the detail on building and holding that water, it sits with the Sulawesi shrimp care parameters.

What to check before you order a Matano shrimp

Check your tank first and the listing second. You’re ready when all five of these are true:

• Your tank has been running long enough to grow visible biofilm on rock and glass, not just to clear a cycle on paper.
• Ammonia and nitrite read zero, and they’ve read zero for weeks.
• Your water already sits inside the band above without daily correction.
• The listing names a species, not only a lake and a color.
• The listing says the stock is tank-bred.

That last one isn’t a formality. You saw above that C. dennerli lives in one lake and nowhere else on earth, which is a thin margin for any animal. At Shrimp Aquatics every shrimp we ship is bred by us rather than collected from the wild, and on a single-lake species we wouldn’t buy it any other way.

References

5 Sources

1. Radiation of endemic species flocks in ancient lakes: systematic revision of the freshwater shrimp Caridina H. Milne Edwards, 1837 (Crustacea: Decapoda: Atyidae) from the ancient lakes of Sulawesi, Indonesia, with the description of eight new species, Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 57(2): 343-452, 2009.
2. Caridina lanceolata Woltereck, 1937, taxonomic treatment, Plazi TreatmentBank record of Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 57(2), 2009.
3. Caridina loehae Woltereck, 1937, taxonomic treatment, Plazi treatment on Zenodo of Cai, Wowor and Choy, Zootaxa 2045: 15-32, 2009.
4. Caridina masapi Woltereck, 1937, taxonomic treatment, Plazi TreatmentBank record of Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 57(2), 2009.
5. Caridina caerulea von Rintelen and Cai, 2009, taxonomic treatment, Plazi TreatmentBank record of Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 57(2), 2009.