Water parameters, molting, and species guides.
There’s a tub of spirulina on the shelf and a colony of Sulawesi shrimp grazing the rock right beside it. Your shrimp will eat it, and nothing about them makes it a strange food: these lake Caridina spend their day…
Does a Sulawesi shrimp tank need the CO2 setup your planted tank runs on? 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…
Your rock is growing a fuzz of hair algae, and someone told you a colony of Sulawesi shrimp would clean it up. Sulawesi shrimp do eat algae, but only the thin living film on rock, glass and hardscape, which is…
Got a fresh container of RO water and Sulawesi shrimp waiting for it? Don’t pour it in yet: Sulawesi shrimp (lake Caridina species) need RO or RO/DI water rebuilt with a mineral made for this group until the batch tests…
Sulawesi colony struggling and nothing looks obviously wrong? The cause usually traces back to a short list of decisions made before the shrimp ever arrived: an active soil working against the pH, mineral that never fully dissolved, a tank that…
Your Sulawesi tank has settled, the shrimp look fine, and every schedule you’ve read gives a different number. Change the water in a Sulawesi shrimp tank when your test kit says so, not on a fixed calendar: when nitrate climbs…
Which rock can you trust in a Sulawesi tank? Porous volcanic lava rock, because it’s inert, so it leaves your water where you set it, and its open pores hold the film the shrimp graze. Ask those two things of…
Your test kit says the pH in your Sulawesi tank has slipped, and you want it back up without hurting the shrimp. Do it by rebuilding the water outside the tank and exchanging it in slowly, not by dosing the…
How often do Sulawesi shrimp need prepared food? Not daily: in an established tank, Sulawesi shrimp (Caridina spp.) spend the whole day grazing the biofilm and algae already growing on rock, glass and substrate, and prepared food is only a…
You’ve got a tin of shrimp food, a tank of Sulawesi shrimp and a label telling you to feed every day. Feed far less than that: a portion small enough that nothing is left for you to take back out.…
Your test kit finally reads zero ammonia and zero nitrite, so can the Sulawesi shrimp go in? Not yet. A mature Sulawesi tank needs a biological filter that clears ammonia and nitrite to zero in warm alkaline water, and after…
Your Sulawesi tank tested fine last week, and today the pH, TDS or temperature reads somewhere else. Stabilizing it means picking one workable point inside the group’s warm, alkaline range and then removing every process that quietly moves the water…
