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 come from two ancient lake systems on one Indonesian island, Lake Poso and the Malili lakes. The water there is warm and carries very little dissolved mineral, yet it still sits on the alkaline side of neutral. The…
Yes, you can build a community tank around Sulawesi shrimp. The guest list is short, though, and the water decides it, not temperament. Anything you add has to live permanently at 79-86°F (26-30°C) and pH 7.5-8.5, it has to leave…
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.…
Rabbit snails are the only tank mate that fits a Sulawesi shrimp tank without asking the shrimp to give something up. A short list of nerites, two or three endemic fish and a handful of Neocaridina can work in a…
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…
Sulawesi shrimp are rock grazers that stay close to cover, so some hiding is simply how the group behaves. The question worth answering isn’t whether they hide, but whether they still come out. Shrimp that graze in the open at…
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…
