When your female Cherry Shrimps get pregnant, they will frequently fan their eggs. This is done to keep the eggs clean and oxygenated until the shrimplets are ready to be born.
If one of your berried shrimps aren’t fanning her eggs, then you can take a look at this troubleshoot guide from Aquarium Blueprints to see what steps you can take to potentially fix this behavior.
1. The first step we recommend taking is to make sure that your pregnant shrimp isn’t too stressed out.
You should avoid putting your Cherry Shrimps with any aggressive fish or tank mates. Ideally, you should only have a shrimp-only tank or an aquarium with just shrimps and snails.
2. You should also provide plenty of hiding spots for your females to make them feel more secure.
A heavily planted aquarium and/or tanks with a lot of rock piles with small cervices will work extremely well.
3. We also recommend testing your tank water to see if there are any spikes in ammonia, nitrites and/or nitrates.
For pristine water quality when it comes to Cherry Shrimps, you need to have 0 ppm of ammonia, 0 ppm of nitrites and less than 20 ppm of nitrates.
4. Furthermore, you should make sure that your pH level is within the recommended range of 6.5 to 7.5.
5. The tank should also be within 7 to 15 GH as well as 2 to 8 KH.
To safely increase and/or stabilize both of these water parameters, we recommend adding a piece of cuttlebone to your tank.
6. Moreover, you can try reducing the water current in your tank as it may be too strong for your berried shrimp to be able to multitask trying to move around the tank and fanning her eggs at the same time.
If you have an air stone, then you can try turning down the air flow so that it won’t bother your pregnant inverts.
If you have a filter, then you can try slowing down the water flow.
7. You should make sure that your female Cherry Shrimps are eating well so that they are healthy enough to take care of the eggs.
We have great success growing our colony by feeding them a combination of Bacter AE along with Shrimp King products.
If you have other foods, then make sure you provide plenty of minerals and protein to your shrimps for a balanced diet.
8. Lastly, the reason your female shrimp may not be fanning her eggs may be due to inexperience. It make take a failed pregnancy or two before your female get better at fanning her eggs.
So, if your berried Cherry Shrimp is still not fanning her eggs after trying 7 previous potential solutions, then we recommend that you simply wait until the next time she gets a new sack of eggs to see if she gets better at being a mom.
