One of the vegetables that you can safely feed to your Cherry Shrimps is lettuce. To find out how you can properly prepare this food for your pet inverts, you can take a look at this tutorial from Aquarium Blueprints.
What type of lettuce can you feed to your pet shrimps?
The lettuce you find at your local produce store should be safe enough for the Neocaridina davidi species.
How much lettuce should you feed to your Cherry Shrimps?
The amount of lettuce you should be giving your Cherry Shrimps depends on the population size living in your tank.
To start out, we recommend putting in just a small piece. Once you dropped the vegetable in the aquarium, come back several hours later to see if your shrimps have made any progress.
If they have only eaten a small part of the lettuce, then you can try feeding a smaller piece during the next feeding period. If your shrimps have completely devoured the food, then you can try offering a bigger portion next time.
How often should you feed lettuce?
We recommend treating lettuce as a snack for your Cherry Shrimp. Therefore, you should feed this vegetable no more than once a week.
For a healthy diet, you should feed your pet shrimps specially made food, such as Bacter AE or Shrimp King Complete, so that they will be able to molt and grow healthily.
How to prepare lettuce for Cherry Shrimps
In order to prepare lettuce to feed your pet inverts, you can take the following steps:
1. To start off, rip off the leaf blade portion away from the stem of the lettuce. The stem portion of this plant will be too tough for your shrimps to pick apart; therefore, you should only feed them the leaf blade.
2. Next, you recommend thoroughly washing the lettuce leaf with your tap water. Doing so should remove any contaminants and pesticides.
3. After rinsing the food, you then need to boil or blanch it. This will help make the leaf softer and easier to pick apart for your Cherries.
You have several ways of doing so:
Drop the lettuce in a pot with boiling water on your stove.
Put the lettuce in a bowl with already boiled water.
Put the lettuce in a bowl with lukewarm water, cover the top but leave a small opening and then microwave the bowl for several minutes.
4. After boiling/blanching, let the lettuce cool down with the hot water.
5. Once the water has dropped to lukewarm temperature, you can take the lettuce out and then drop it in your shrimp tank.
6. If the leaf does not fall to the bottom of the tank, which could happen if you are only feeding a small portion, then we suggest using a clean toothpick. Pierce the toothpick through the leaf and then stick it to the substrate to make it stay sink to the bottom of the aquarium.
7. You can leave the lettuce in your shrimp tank as long as it doesn’t start to decompose. We personally remove any uneaten portion the next day if our shrimps don’t seem too interested in eating more.
How to get your shrimps interested in eating lettuce
If your Cherry Shrimps do not seem interested in eating lettuce, then you can try not feeding any other food for a day or two.
Afterwards, try to feed them the vegetable to see if they are more willing to eat it now that they have an empty stomach that needs to be filled.