What it is
The classic red-and-white bee shrimp (bee is the hobby name for crystals, bolts, dragons and fancy tigers). Needs soft water, and worth the extra work. Sold under the name Caridina cantonensis.
What water does it need?
These need water with almost no KH (carbonate hardness, the part that stops the pH swinging). They also need a pH (how acid or alkaline the water is) a little on the acid side. And it has to stay put. Most Australian tap water is far too hard, and no conditioner takes hardness out. So unless you already know your tap water is soft, plan on four things. RO water (tap water with everything filtered out by a reverse-osmosis filter). Shrimp minerals (sold as a remineraliser; it puts the right minerals back in). An active soil (a tank soil that keeps the water soft and slightly acid). And a tank that has been running for at least eight weeks. Melbourne and parts of Sydney can be soft enough to be worth testing first. Measure your KH and TDS (the total of everything dissolved in the water) before you buy anything. Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane and most regional supplies are not close.
In the table: pH is how acid or alkaline the water is. GH is the minerals in the water.
KH is the part that holds pH steady. TDS is everything in the water added up.
| pH | 5.8 – 6.8 |
| GH (hardness) | 4 – 6 dGH |
| KH (carbonate) | 0 – 2 dKH |
| TDS (total minerals) | 100 – 150 ppm |
| Temperature | 20 – 24 °C |
If your tap water is hard and you don't want to run an RO filter, the
Neocaridina colours are happy in harder water and cost less.
The full story, including cycling your tank, copper and which fish are safe, is on the
water & care page. Read it before you order, not after.
Will they breed? Can I mix them?
They breed, but slowly. Six or more in a steady tank will have babies in a few months. Three can,
but it takes longer.
Keep one kind per tank. This shrimp will breed with
every other bee shrimp we sell (bee is the hobby name for crystals, bolts, dragons and fancy tigers). It will also breed with tiger shrimp, and those babies are tibees (a mix, not a pure copy of either parent). The mixed babies are healthy, but the pattern is gone for good. Cross two bee kinds and you get muddled shrimp with weaker colour and pattern. They never sort themselves out again. Cross a tiger with a bee and you get tibees (a mix that looks like neither parent). There is no way back to either parent kind.
Neocaridina (cherries) and Caridina (crystals and tigers) are different groups of shrimp and cannot breed
with each other. So you can keep one of each in the same tank, if the water suits both.
What does it cost delivered?
$10 a shrimp. We sell them in packs of 5. One foam express box costs the
same to send whether it holds 5 shrimp or thirty. So 5 delivered is
$79.99. That is $16 each with
postage in. The same $29.99 post carries a bigger box too. It drops to $9.99 once
your shrimp come to $149. So the more you order, the less each shrimp costs. Everything goes
out on a Monday or a Tuesday, packed that morning. Every shrimp is guaranteed to arrive alive. The
guarantee is short, and it says what it does not cover.
