If you keep female and male Red Cherry Shrimps, then it is likely that they will end up reproducing at some point. You can easily spot a pregnant female as they should be carrying a batch of eggs with their hind legs.
If your female shrimps keep dropping eggs, then you can take a look at this troubleshooting article at Aquarium Blueprints to see how you can prevent this phenomenon from happening in the future.
Why Red Cherry Shrimps drop eggs
One of the reasons your pregnant Red Cherry Shrimps may end up dropping eggs may be due to high stress.
If your female shrimp is still young, then she may be still inexperience when it comes to holding on to the eggs.
Furthermore, if a pregnant shrimp molt while carrying eggs, then she may end up dropping the eggs during the molting process as well.
Last but not least, the eggs that the pregnant female was previously holding may not have been fertilized.
How to prevent your Red Cherry Shrimps from dropping eggs
In order to prevent your Red Cherry Shrimps from dropping eggs, we suggest taking the following steps:
1. The first step you can take is to make sure that shrimp’s tank mates aren’t causing your shrimps to be stressed out.
Even if they don’t appear to be harmful, fast-moving fish may cause your pregnant shrimp to freak out and drop her eggs.
For best results, we recommend keeping a tank that has only Red Cherry Shrimps. You should also be fine if you have snails in your shrimp tank as snails are slow and aren’t likely to cause the female shrimps to panic.
2. You should also avoid having a high-water flow as it may otherwise cause your fatigue and stress for your egg-carrying inverts.
So, if you have a fish tank filter and/or air stone for your tank, then you can try turning down the flows for both equipment as these may be making the water current too strong.
3. We recommend that you test your water quality as well.
Red Cherry Shrimps are most healthy and stress-free when your tank water contains 0 ppm of ammonia, 0 ppm of nitrites and less than 20 ppm of nitrates.
If the test kit shows that you have more than 0 ppm concentration of ammonia and/or nitrites, then we recommend using Seachem Prime to detoxify both of these nitrogen compound.
Unless your shrimp tank is properly cycled, you need to keep adding Prime every 48 hours to keep ammonia and nitrite safe for shrimps. You can stop once your aquarium becomes fully cycled.
To speed up the cycling process, you use a live bacteria product such as the Seachem Stability.
4. Wild swings in water parameters may also cause stress and trigger your pregnant female shrimps to molt.
So, if order to prevent your pregnant shrimps from eggs, we recommend that you avoid doing water changes, if possible, during pregnancy.
If you need to swap out water due to water quality issues, then we recommend doing small (10% at most) daily water changes. When adding water back into the tank, we also suggest that you drip feed the new water so that your shrimps will slowly acclimate to the changing water instead of being immediately exposed to it.
5. You should also make sure that you are feeding your shrimps the right kinds of food. If you are trying to breed Red Cherry Shrimps, then make sure they have plenty of calcium, magnesium and protein.
We have great success feeding a combination of Shrimp King products along with Bacter AE.
6. For healthy shrimps, you need to pay attention to the GH and KH levels of your tank water. We recommend adding a cuttlebone or two to make these parameters suitable for Red Cherry Shrimps the aquarium.
