Every guide we’ve written on keeping Sulawesi shrimp, covering RO water and KH, feeding, breeding, tank mates and what to check when shrimp start dying. Setting up your first Sulawesi tank? Start with the beginner’s guide. Already have shrimp in the tank? Sulawesi shrimp care parameters lists the water numbers we keep to and how to hold them steady.
Sulawesi shrimp are some of the most striking freshwater invertebrates in the hobby, and also some of the least forgiving. They’re a group of Caridina species from a cluster of ancient lakes on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, and they…
Sulawesi shrimp need warm, alkaline, mineral-rich water kept remarkably stable. As a working target, aim for about 79-86°F (26-30°C), pH 7.5-8.5, GH 4-8 dGH, KH 3-6 dKH and TDS 150-250 ppm, with ammonia and nitrite at 0 ppm and nitrate…
Lake Matano is the lake most Sulawesi keepers end up reading about. The cardinal shrimp lives there and nowhere else. Its surface water is warm, startlingly clear and very short of dissolved minerals. What almost nobody mentions is that the…
A settled Sulawesi shrimp spends almost all its time doing one thing. It works a thin living film off rock with its front legs, a few square millimeters at a time. It moves slowly, stays in contact with a surface,…
Lake Towuti’s surface water has been measured, and it’s warmer, more alkaline and far more dilute than most keepers picture. Seven surface stations were sampled between June and October 2009. The lake averaged 85.3°F (29.6°C) and reached above 86°F (30°C)…
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…
