Successful breeding of the Cardinal Sulawesi Shrimp

[Shadow_Arbor]

Hello everyone,

I haven't posted here in a while but today something fun happened in one of my aquariums!

A few months ago I purchased 15 Cardinal shrimp and attempted to acclimate them to my tap water. After about two months I was left with only three that weren't doing so hot. The breeder that I got them from was using re-mineralized RO water. This convinced me to get an RO system myself for three reasons: Firstly, I really wanted to breed these shrimp. Secondly, I'm starting Uni in a bit and for the foreseeable future will be moving every few years. Acclimating shrimp to new tap water every few years would be exhausting. Thirdly, I wanted to bring down my rock solid tap water in a nano high tech tank so that I'd be able to grow plants that were struggling in my dGH 20 tap water.

After getting the RO unit and Dennerle's sulawesi salt I was at an impasse. The breeder I had purchased the shrimp from, and many of the other local breeders here in Israel, kept these shrimp at 300 tds using the sulawesi salt (this brought the dGH to 11 and dKH to 6-7). All the research I had done, and even the sulawesi salt itself, stated that the natural parameters of these shrimp were half of the earlier stated values. After asking @Cory on a livestream if it would be smart to listen to the local wisdom or try and mimic the shrimps natural habitat I decided to listen to my local breeders. It's been about a month since and the results are in (sorry for the slightly grainy photos)!

Female with eggs (I think, it's kind of hard to tell with Caridina)

Babies

[Remi de Groot]

I remember the answer on the livestream. Great to see the result of it and love your shrimps!

Here in the Netherlands the caridina shrimps are indeed kept in way lower water parameters. But makes sense to use the numbers the shrimps are used to and not a number the internet says.

[Shadow_Arbor]

On 6/16/2021 at 12:29 PM, Remlicht89 said:

I remember the answer on the livestream. Great to see the result of it and love your shrimps!

Here in the Netherlands the caridina shrimps are indeed kept in way lower water parameters. But makes sense to use the numbers the shrimps are used to and not a number the internet says.

Yeah, also in Germany and pretty much all of Europe as far as I could google. I wonder how they got to such higher parameters here. My best guess is that someone had the wrong information on water parameters but managed to acclimate the shrimp to these parameters. Afterwords it must have stuck, passed on by word of mouth.