When keeping Red Cherry Shrimps, you may find one or two of them climbing or crawling out of your fish tank. If you don’t get them back into the tank in time, then they may end up perishing away. To see how you can stop these escape attempts, you can take a look at this guide from Aquarium Blueprints.
1. For the first step, you should make sure that there isn’t anything wrong with your water parameters that may be making your Red Cherry Shrimps uncomfortable.
When it comes to temperature the Neocaridina species can live comfortably within a wide range of 57°F to 86°F (or 14°C to 30°C).
As for water parameters, you need to make sure that your aquarium has 0 ppm of ammonia, 0 ppm of nitrites as well as less than 20 ppm of nitrates. Furthermore, the pH range should also be between 6.5 to 7.5.
While other parameters are not as important, you may want to aim for a range of 7 to 15 GH as well as 2 to 8 KH.
2. Another step you can take is to lower the top of the water line in your shrimp tank. By making your water surface at least 1 inch away from the top of your tank, your shrimps will have a more difficult time trying to climb or crawl out of it.
3. Of course, you should also put a top on your fish tank in order to block off any openings that may make it easy for your shrimp to escape.
A top is also helpful as it will prevent evaporation, prevent any bugs from getting inside as well as help insulate the temperature of your tank water.
4. Furthermore, make sure that you have suitable tankmates for your Red Cherry Shrimps. A vast majority of fishes will eat or attack the small inverts even if they show no interest in doing so in the beginning.
If possible, we recommend that you keep a shrimp-only tank. Alternatively, slow-moving snails should work well as tankmates. We keep our Red Cherry Shrimps with Ramshorn Snails and both of these species get along peacefully.
5. Big swings to water parameters may also stress out your shrimps, which may eventually lead to them finding a way to get out of the aquarium.
In order to prevent big swings, we recommend that you swap out no more than 20% of your tank’s water at a time. We also suggest that you drip in the new water into your tank to slowly acclimate your shrimps.
Furthermore, you should also remove any uneaten food, as well as dead shrimps and other creatures, from the aquarium as soon as possible in order to prevent any sudden spikes to ammonia, nitrites and/or nitrates.
