How Sulawesi Shrimp Differ From Other Freshwater Shrimp

Can a Sulawesi shrimp tank be run like the cherry or crystal shrimp tank you already know? No: Sulawesi shrimp are lake specialists that need warm alkaline water at 79-86°F (26-30°C) and pH 7.5-8.5, an inert tank with a real grazing surface, and a steady routine. Most of what works for cherry or crystal shrimp has to change. Everything below is a difference that changes what you build or what you do, not trivia about where they come from.

Sulawesi shrimp need warm alkaline water, not the soft acidic water bee shrimp want

Sulawesi shrimp sit at the warm alkaline end, and of the three groups the hobby actually keeps, they’re the only one that needs carbonate hardness held up instead of stripped out. Side by side, the pattern’s easy to read. Neocaridina sit close to ordinary tap water in much of the world. Bee and crystal Caridina sit at the soft acidic end. Amano shrimp, the large river Caridina sold to graze algae in planted community tanks, sit outside all three. Temperature alone keeps Sulawesi shrimp and Amano shrimp out of the same tank.

Two rows do most of the work. The first is temperature. The Sulawesi range starts at 79°F (26°C), above the top of the range Neocaridina are usually kept in. A room temperature tank isn’t a Sulawesi tank, and a heater isn’t an optional refinement. The second is carbonate hardness. A bee tank is run at 0-2 dKH, with the substrate chosen to keep it there. A Sulawesi tank has to hold 3-6 dKH, so nothing in it can be quietly working against that.

Why such different water? It comes from where these animals live. They’re lake shrimp from the unique ancient lakes of central Sulawesi, and that water is warm and alkaline year round. Surface water sampled across the Poso watershed in 2021 was warm and strongly alkaline, with pH readings above 9 at every sampling zone.¹

Can you reuse a bee shrimp setup for Sulawesi shrimp?

No, and the two parts that have to change are the two you’d most like to keep: the substrate and the mineral.

A bee or crystal tank is usually built on an active buffering substrate, chosen to hold the water at pH 5.8-6.8 with KH 0-2 dKH. That substrate does its job in a bee tank and the wrong job in this one, because a Sulawesi tank has to hold 3-6 dKH instead. What you want here is inert substrate and inert hardscape, rock and sand that don’t react with the water, and inert applies to wood and leaves too. If you’d like botanicals in the tank for looks, test KH and pH before and after adding them.

The mineral changes with it, because the target is different. A Sulawesi mix has to lift carbonate hardness and general hardness together, which isn’t what a bee tank asks of a remineralizer. These salts also behave differently in the bucket. Take SaltyShrimp’s Sulawesi Mineral 8.5, a product with published instructions: it raises carbonate and total hardness at a ratio of KH to dH of 0.78 to 1.0. The maker states that it dissolves almost completely only when CO2 is added over about 3-4 days. After that, the water needs at least three hours of aeration with an air stone to drive the CO2 back out before it’s used.² Remineralizing RO water for Sulawesi shrimp is a process with a waiting period in it, not a scoop and a stir.

There’s one more reason the mineral side isn’t negotiable. The calcium a crustacean puts into a new shell comes mainly from the water it lives in, not from what it eats.³ The hardness in your tank is the material the animals build with.

How much do Sulawesi shrimp need feeding compared with cherry shrimp?

Less, because most of their food grows on the rock and glass. Mature biofilm, aufwuchs and algae are the grazing base in a Sulawesi tank, which is the real reason a mature tank has to be in place before the shrimp arrive. Prepared food can’t stand in for a grazing surface that hasn’t grown yet. A Neocaridina tank runs on the same biofilm plus a normal schedule of prepared food, and that schedule is exactly what most keepers carry over out of habit.

How that translates to your tank depends on how much grazing surface you have and how many shrimp are on it. Acceptance varies by species, by system and by the food itself. So don’t read one refused feeding as proof that a line eats nothing prepared, and don’t assume a line that takes food will keep taking it. Offer a small amount, watch whether it’s grazed, and take out what isn’t.

Warm alkaline water punishes slips that a cherry shrimp tank forgives

The same forgotten pellet does more damage in a Sulawesi tank, and the reason is chemistry. This is the part that catches keepers who’ve run shrimp tanks for years.

Ammonia in water sits in two forms, and the un-ionized form is the one that drives toxicity. The ratio of un-ionized ammonia to ammonium ion in fresh water rises about tenfold for each rise of a single pH unit. It roughly doubles for each rise of 10 degrees Celsius between 0 and 30 degrees Celsius.⁴ A Sulawesi tank is run high on both scales at once, and your test kit won’t show you that. The same total ammonia reading means something different at pH 8 and 84°F than it does in a cherry shrimp tank at pH 6.5 and 72°F.

Oxygen pulls in the same direction. Cold water holds more dissolved oxygen than warm water,⁵ so a tank held at 79-86°F (26-30°C) has less of it to work with than the same tank at room temperature. The oxygen buffer under a heavy feeding day is smaller here, which is another reason the same slip costs more.

The water also moves on its own. Evaporation concentrates the dissolved solids left behind,⁶ so TDS climbs between water changes even in a tank you haven’t touched. Top up with unmineralized RO water, not prepared water, and read TDS often enough to see the trend coming.

So the routine changes shape. Keep ammonia and nitrite at zero, and keep nitrate low, under 10 ppm as a working target. Replace water in small volumes, with water matched for temperature, pH, hardness and TDS before it goes in. Fast swings in temperature, pH, hardness or TDS are the thing to design against, and they’re easier to cause in a tank that’s warm, buffered and small.

A Sulawesi colony grows nothing like a Neocaridina colony

Plan for a slow tank, because a Sulawesi colony adds animals slowly. The taxonomic revision of the Sulawesi lake Caridina counted the eggs that wild egg carrying females held: 8-14 eggs in Caridina dennerli from seven females, 17-31 in C. spinata from three, and 19-29 in C. woltereckae from two. Across the described species, the counts run from 8 to 80 eggs depending on which species is measured.⁷ Those are small wild samples caught at one moment, not captive averages, and the spread is exactly why no single brood number describes the group.

What the counts are good for is setting expectations. Where a number hasn’t been measured we’d rather not print one, so take the direction and not a rate. A quiet month isn’t, by itself, evidence that something’s wrong. Buy the group size you actually want to keep, not a starter pair and a plan to multiply. Give it a mature tank, and read the tank by whether the shrimp are out grazing and behaving normally.

Can Sulawesi shrimp share a tank with your other shrimp?

Not with bee or crystal shrimp. The two sets of water values point in opposite directions, and no single setting satisfies both.

With Neocaridina, temperature is less of a barrier than the ranges suggest. Neocaridina are usually kept at 65-78°F (18-26°C) and a Sulawesi tank runs at 79-86°F (26-30°C). Even so, they grow and breed at 82°F (28°C), and at Shrimp Aquatics a small group lives and breeds in some of our Sulawesi tanks at up to 86°F (30°C).⁸ Still considering it? First settle whether both animals genuinely fit the temperature and chemistry you’ll run and whether the tank can carry both bioloads. Then ask whether there’s enough grazing surface for two populations that both feed on it. A breeding colony of another shrimp species inside a specialist Sulawesi tank isn’t something we’d set up by default.

Fish deserve the same caution. Sulawesi shrimp are peaceful and often shy, so a shy grazer in a warm tank with fish is a shrimp you’ll rarely see, quite apart from the predation risk. Fish described as generally shrimp safe can still take shrimplets and sometimes adults. That risk doesn’t disappear because the species has a good reputation.

What to check before you buy Sulawesi shrimp

Check your own tank against the list below, and be honest about it, because this is an advanced to expert group. The usual failure isn’t one dramatic mistake. It’s a tank that was never quite right.

• You can hold 79-86°F (26-30°C) steadily, overnight and through a room that cools.
• You can hold pH 7.5-8.5, GH 4-8 dGH, KH 3-6 dKH and TDS 150-250 ppm, and you know what your water does between changes.
• Your substrate and hardscape are inert, so nothing in the tank is pulling carbonate hardness back down.
• The tank is mature, with ammonia and nitrite at zero and visible grazing surfaces on rock and glass.
• You can prepare and match replacement water before it goes in, so you never have to top up from the tap.
• You’re hoping to add them to an established community tank, a bee tank or a tank running on active soil. That’s a different build, not a stocking decision.
• You want a colony that fills the tank within a few months.

Where the animals came from belongs in the same decision. The best known species in the group, the Sulawesi White Sock cardinal shrimp (Caridina dennerli), is endemic to Lake Matano in the Malili Lakes system. The IUCN Red List assessed it in August 2018 as Critically Endangered under criterion A2e and tagged it possibly extinct in the wild.⁹ The aquarium trade is recorded among its uses. That makes sourcing part of what you’re buying. Ask whether stock was bred in tanks or taken from the lakes before you order, and note that our Sulawesi shrimp are bred by Shrimp Aquatics and not collected from the wild.

If the honest answer to the checklist is “not yet”, build and mature the tank first and buy afterwards. A settling tank is the hardest environment you can hand this group, and nothing added later makes up for it.

References

9 Sources

1. Trophic Status of Waters in Poso Watershed, Central Sulawesi, abstract, IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science 950, 2022.
2. Sulawesi Mineral 8,5, minerals and trace elements, SaltyShrimp product information page, copyright 2018.
3. Biomineralizations: insights and prospects from crustaceans, ZooKeys 176, 2012.
4. Aquatic Life Ambient Water Quality Criteria for Ammonia, Freshwater, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Water, April 2013.
5. Dissolved Oxygen and Water, U.S. Geological Survey Water Science School, updated August 24, 2026.
6. Chloride, Salinity, and Dissolved Solids, U.S. Geological Survey, March 1, 2019.
7. Radiation of endemic species flocks in ancient lakes: systematic revision of the freshwater shrimp Caridina from the ancient lakes of Sulawesi, Indonesia, Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 57(2), 2009.
8. Tropea, Stumpf and Lopez Greco, Effect of Temperature on Biochemical Composition, Growth and Reproduction of the Ornamental Red Cherry Shrimp Neocaridina heteropoda heteropoda (Decapoda, Caridea), PLOS ONE 10(3): e0119468, 2015.
9. Caridina dennerli, Red List assessment, IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, assessed 20 August 2018.