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.
Plan on 3-4 weeks at minimum, and treat that number as a floor. At Shrimp Aquatics we don’t rush a new Sulawesi tank. With a powdered bacterial starter our normal minimum is 3-4 weeks. With a liquid or live culture…
In a Sulawesi tank the water sets the parameters and the substrate stays out of it. The right bed is inert, dark, coarse enough to stay open and thin enough to siphon. That means crushed lava rock or basalt gravel…
A Sulawesi biotope is a warm, alkaline, rock and biofilm tank built on remineralized RO water and then left alone long enough to mature. The order of the build matters more than the scape. Mix the water first. Set inert…
No dissolved oxygen requirement has ever been published for a Sulawesi shrimp, so there’s no target number that comes from the animals themselves. What was measured is the water they came from. In Lake Towuti, one of the Malili lakes,…
Keeping Sulawesi shrimp healthy is mostly a stability problem, not a medicine problem. These are lake shrimp from warm, alkaline, biologically mature water. In a home tank they need the same thing held still: 79-86°F (26-30°C), pH 7.5-8.5, GH 4-8…
Sulawesi shrimp need alkaline water because it’s the water they evolved in, and because nothing in a closed aquarium replaces it. The lake-system Caridina sold under this name come from two ancient lake systems on one Indonesian island, Lake Poso…
Sulawesi shrimp need warm water because the water they evolved in is warm and stays that way. The lake Caridina sold under this name are endemic to the ancient lakes of central Sulawesi. The cardinal shrimp Caridina dennerli is restricted…
Sulawesi shrimp are lake specialists, and most of what works in a cherry shrimp or crystal shrimp tank has to change for them. They need water held warm and alkaline at 79-86°F (26-30°C) and pH 7.5-8.5, an inert tank with…
At Shrimp Aquatics, our Sulawesi shrimp live about one to two years, and most keepers plan on about two. There’s no published lifespan for Caridina dennerli, for White Sock, Blue Ghost, Oiran or any other lake species in the group,…
Sulawesi shrimp are dwarf shrimp, and the honest answer is that nobody has published a measured adult maximum for them. The 2009 revision that describes most of the group measures carapace length, the shield over the head and thorax, rather…
Sulawesi shrimp come from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, and from two ancient lake systems inside it that have never shared water. One is the Malili system, five connected lakes drained westward by the Larona River into Bone Bay. The…
No Sulawesi shrimp is a beginner shrimp. If you want one anyway, start with tank-bred Cardinal shrimp (Caridina dennerli), the lake species with published rearing data behind it and an established place in the aquarium trade. The species you pick…
