Water parameters, molting, and species guides.
You have a cardinal shrimp listing open in one tab and a harlequin shrimp in the other. Cardinal shrimp and Sulawesi harlequin shrimp are both Caridina from the ancient lakes of Sulawesi, and they want the same warm, alkaline water.…
So what makes the lakes behind your Sulawesi shrimp so special? Age, isolation and water that hardly ever changes. The shrimp come from two ancient lake systems on one Indonesian island, Lake Poso and the Malili chain,[[1]] cut off from…
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…
Where do Sulawesi shrimp actually live in the wild, and how much of that can your tank copy? Sulawesi shrimp come from two ancient lake systems on one Indonesian island, where they live in a thin strip near shore, in…
Your Sulawesi shrimp tank is running well, and now you’d like something else living in it. You can build a community tank around these shrimp, but anything you add has to live permanently at 79-86°F (26-30°C) and pH 7.5-8.5, leave…
Why would a Sulawesi tank that looked fine at lights out hold dead shrimp by morning? Almost always because something changed in the previous 24 hours, in the water or in the room around it, and the readings that would…
Your Sulawesi shrimp has been parked on the bottom for an hour, and you can’t tell whether it’s grazing or in trouble. It’s fine as long as something on it is still moving: a grazing shrimp works its mouthparts nonstop,…
What can actually share a tank with Sulawesi shrimp? Rabbit snails, and they’re the only tank mate that fits without asking the shrimp to give something up. A short list of nerites, two or three endemic fish and a handful…
Your Sulawesi shrimp have left the rock and are swimming laps around the tank. That’s one of two things: adult males searching for a female that has just molted, or a fault in the water. Who is swimming tells you…
Why have your Sulawesi shrimp gone pale? Almost always because of something in the tank, not something wrong with the shrimp: light, background, a recent molt and above all the water move color around in these animals, and the color…
Most days you see a few Sulawesi shrimp on the rock, and the rest of the colony is somewhere behind it. Some hiding is normal for these rock grazers, so the thing to check is whether they still come out…
Did your new Sulawesi shrimp start dying within days of going into the tank? 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…
