The Red Cherry Shrimp is the most popular variant of the Neocaridina species. You can take a look at this guide from Aquarium Blueprints to see how you can make them redder than they already are.
1. For the first step, we recommend that you remove as much stressful triggers as possible. This is because your Cherries can turn pale when they are overly stressed. To create a stress-free shrimp tank, you can do the following:
- If possible, avoid keeping Cherry Shrimps with fish and other potential predators in the same tank.
- Make sure you have 0 ppm on ammonia, 0 ppm of nitrites and less than 20 ppm of nitrates when testing your tank water.
- As for the other water parameters, you should aim for a range of 6.5 to 7.5 pH, 7 to 15 GH as well as 2 to 8 KH.
- Keep your Cherries between a temperature range of 57°F to 86°F (or 14°C to 30°C). Outside of this range, they may end up feeling stressed.
- You should also make sure that the water flow isn’t too strong that it may overwhelm your shrimps.
- Provide a lot of hiding spaces so that the inverts have somewhere safe to go if they feel threatened.
- Avoid doing major water changes as it may result in big swings in water parameters, which will stress your pets. Instead, swap out no more than 10% of your tank water.
2. You should also make sure that you are feeding your Red Cherry Shrimps with the proper diet. We recommend looking for food that contains Spirulina, which is a blue-green algae that helps with enhancing the colors of your Cherries.
Furthermore, you should make sure that they get plenty of protein and vital minerals. We have great success feeding a combination of Bacter AE and Shrimp King Complete. You can find our reviews for both of these products with the following links:
3. Furthermore, you can try adding a dark substrate and or background. By doing so will make the red coloration of your shrimps stand out more.
Dark green plants, such as Java Fern and Java Moss, should also help highlight the redness of your pet inverts.
4. Female cherries are more likely to be more colorful when compared to their male counterparts. Therefore, you can try to make sure that you significantly more females than males.
5. For future generations of your colony, you may want to consider removing shrimps that aren’t very red from the tank. By culling them, you will be able to prevent their less-than-ideal genes from being passed on to the newer generation.
As we stated above, the female shrimps are more colorful than the male ones. Therefore, you need to be careful that you don’t remove all your male shrimps if you want to maintain the population of your colony.
