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.
Every Sulawesi shrimp in the table below carries a current IUCN Red List assessment, and every one of them sits in a threatened category. Five are Critically Endangered, two are Vulnerable, and one of the five also carries the Possibly…
Sulawesi shrimp aren’t one animal with color variants. The name covers freshwater Caridina that evolved inside two ancient lake systems on a single Indonesian island, and the most recent island-wide survey records 62 atyid shrimp species on Sulawesi, 43 of…
Blue Leg Poso has the best documented case, and among the lines that are easy to buy, the Cardinal group is the one singled out as less demanding. No published trial ranks Sulawesi shrimp species by how hard they are…
About two dozen, if you mean the lake species the hobby calls Sulawesi shrimp, out of 62 atyid shrimp species on the whole island. The exact number depends on what you count. The most recent island-wide survey of Sulawesi’s atyid…
You don’t have to remove every male Sulawesi shrimp, and a colony that already holds more females than males usually needs nothing netted out at all. Males matter for one reason. Mating is timed to the moment a female finishes…
Neither one is better in general. Sulawesi Mineral 7.5 and Sulawesi Mineral 8.5 are built to land at opposite ends of the same pH 7.5-8.5 target. So choose by which end your filter, your equipment and your weekly routine can…
For a Sulawesi shrimp tank, the default filter is an air-driven sponge filter. A matten filter, which is a foam wall with an airlift behind it, is the same idea scaled up for a larger tank. Both put biological media,…
Sulawesi shrimp, the lake-system Caridina species traded as Cardinal, White Sock, Blue Ghost and Oiran, need RO water because it’s the only starting point you fully control. A reverse osmosis unit pushes water through a semi-permeable membrane and splits it…
Care sheets say three to five months, and some say four to six, but none of them cites a study that timed a Sulawesi shrimp from hatching to its first brood. One published rearing trial on cardinal shrimp (Caridina dennerli)…
In our tanks, young Sulawesi shrimp molt more often than adults, and a water change often sets off a round of molts. The one to two week interval you’ll see quoted for adult cardinal, white sock or blue leg shrimp…
For most keepers, no. A Sulawesi tank is held at 79-86°F (26-30°C) and pH 7.5-8.5, and that combination works against aquatic plants twice over. It leaves almost no free carbon dioxide for them to photosynthesize with. It also turns any…
KH is the carbonate reserve that decides how far your pH moves each day and where it settles when it stops moving. In a Sulawesi tank you’re asked to hold pH 7.5-8.5, which is well above where most freshwater naturally…
